TGIF: Abolish Billionaires?

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to abolish billionaires. You read that right. He says he'd confiscate 100 percent of people's money above the $999 million mark -- as if that would cover a significant portion of the nearly $7 trillion the feds will spend in the next fiscal year. Even if the government stole everything over $1 million, the money wouldn't go very far. The rich don't have enough money to finance the profligate state, and they wouldn't submit to the tax collector even if they did: incentives matter.

But no matter -- raising revenue is not Sanders's goal. He just wants to deprive people of money he thinks they do not deserve. Why don't they deserve it? Because it's so much more than most people have. So there.

Sanders, who has long favored a wealth tax on top of the income tax, says, "I think people can make it on $999 million”  -- as though it's for him and his colleagues in power to tell people how much they are allowed to want or need.

Don't bother to point out that most billionaires -- over 70 percent -- are self-made (not that inherited money should be confiscated either). Sanders won't care. For him, a person who makes a fabulous fortune or builds on inherited wealth by providing valued goods and services better than competitors is no different from one who gets money by stealing it or, what is the same thing, having good connections with politicians. It would be a different matter if Sanders paid attention to the myriad ways the politicians help some people gain wealth at the expense of others, but that's not what he does. His target is wealth per se.

He just doesn't like wealth inequality, and right now he's drawing the line at billionaires. Later on he'll probably be willing to lower the threshold further. Do you think he'll be content with almost-billionaires on the loose? Presumably the new level will be above his own millionaire status. “I wrote a best-selling book," he said. "If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too." However, he apparently was being modest about his wealth.

Who really epitomizes "greed," as people typically define it? Value-creating entrepreneurs who engage strictly in voluntary exchange? Or Sanders, who covets other people's money for his own purposes and is ready to call on armed agents to seize it? Don't be fooled because he says it wants to benefit other people with that money. In fact, he wants to expropriate the money of creators so he can live his chosen life as a savior. Beware humanitarians with guns.

We're talking about envy and bitter ignorance. Why should anyone take seriously a plan to confiscate wealth? It can't be because the confiscators will put the money to better use. That cannot be the case because the confiscators are insulated from the signals that indicate how consumers would like scarce resources to be used. Those signals are prices, the spontaneous result of suppliers and demanders interacting -- cooperating -- in competitive markets.

Governments, as we all too well know, squander unbelievable amounts of wealth on overt and covert wars, subsidies to the well-connected, politically favored infrastructure boondoggles, and the like. And there is the disappearing money, which audits constantly show. The pro-confiscation lobby seems to delight in transferring wealth from where it is subject to market forces generated by regular people and giving it to politicians who only have to pretend to care about the people. If they really cared, they let people keep their money and make their own decisions.

But is it their money? A couple of Sanders supporters say on YouTube that the money doesn't actually belong to wealthy people. How do they know? Do you see any business person's name on the money? they ask. It's the government's money, and the government is just taking it back. (Watch this.) They don't seem to realize that their astounding claim would apply to low-income people too. Have they never wondered where the government gets the money? It's not through production.

It's true that the government operates the monetary system, but that's only because it won't let a competitive free-banking system operate. Such a system would have no need for the government's printing press or the Federal Reserve's magical money machine. Stable free banking and market-based money, without government involvement, is as old as ancient Greece.

But don't expect Sanders and his ilk to know that. They are a resentful group that disguises its envy in deceptive blather about equality. The kind of equality they want ignores the vast differences in people's capacity to satisfy consumers in the marketplace. It also assumes that one person's gain in what Adam Smith called the "natural system of liberty" is another's person's loss -- which is demonstrably false. Unlike political relations, market transactions tend to be win-win in the eyes of the participants. The only equality worth struggling for is "equality of authority," in which no one has the power to aggress against anyone else. 

The bottom line is that no one has the right to take anyone's honestly acquired possessions -- including money -- from anyone else.

TGIF: The Mythical Right to Medical Care

This clever video juxtaposes footage of Bernie Sanders and the late Milton Friedman to create a debate over whether the central government should take over medical care in America. Sanders condemns as a "national disgrace" the lack of a medical care guarantee for all -- rich, poor, and in between. Medical care, he insists, should be "a right of citizenship." Then, echoing someone in the audience, he changes that to "health care is absolutely a human right."

The remarks by Friedman from the '60s and '70s chosen for the video address the efficiency problems with government-run medical services, including the inevitable restrictions on consumer choice. Politicians and activists may feel good when they passionately declare that the government should guarantee all people medical care. Unfortunately, such declarations neither create nor deliver quality care justly or efficiently. Friedman was a long-time advocate of the separation of medicine and state. In his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, he called for, among other things, the end of medical licensing, and he defended that view in these recorded remarks before a group of presumably uncomfortable doctors at the Mayo Clinic.

Since Friedman spoke as an economist, not a political philosopher, in his remarks, I thought I'd say something about the rights issue that Sanders raises. To pick a nit: Sanders needs to make up his mind. Is medical care a right of American citizenship or a human right? I don't see how it can be both. The term human right suggests universality, while a right of American citizenship does not.

But let's leave that and look at this purported right. The first thing that occurred to me is that this "right" doesn't match its billing. Medical care is not like air or water; it doesn't appear naturally. On the contrary, the many services and products that constitute medical care must be created through human effort.

This ought to pose a problem for the right-to-medical-care set. A declared right to medical care would camouflage something even more ominous: a right to the labor of doctors, nurses, technicians, developers of medicines, inventors and producers of medical devices, and so on.

That raises a question: do those people have a say in the matter? If the answer is yes, then there goes the purported right; they would be free to decline to go along. But if the answer is no, they are no longer free people, but slaves. Don't we all agree that slavery is bad? (Well, almost everyone. Slavery still exists today, including in Libya, thanks to the U.S.-led regime change in 2011, and many other places. The number of slaves today is larger than in previous times, but it gets nowhere the attention still given to American slavery, which was abolished 158 years ago.) Abraham Lincoln correctly said that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." It follows that if self-ownership -- the opposite of slavery -- isn't right, nothing is right.

Is Sanders calling for slavery?

No, no, he and his allies will protest. No one is talking about slavery. No one wants anyone compelled to produce medical services and products. (I'm not entirely sure about that. Would they not endorse conscription for doctors if enough of them opted out of Medicare and Medicaid because of the bureaucratic intrusions?)

If they don't favor slavery, what do they mean? They mean that the government should guarantee payment for medical services for all. (As if the government would pay for something without dictating terms.) But how can the government guarantee payment? Society's medical bill is huge (partly because of government intrusion on both the supply and demand sides), and politicians and bureaucrats certainly don't personally have that sort of money. So they'd have to get it from somewhere else, and we know where that is: the pockets of the people living in America. All that politicians and bureaucrats can do is rearrange existing wealth according to their own preferences. (Actually, it's worse than that; by intervening, they impede the creation of new wealth and innovation in the medical field.)

One way or another, the government would have to transfer wealth from the people who create it to bureaucrats. If the chosen method is taxation (and if it didn't create a tax revolt), the transfer would be straightforward. The dollars the government takes and spends are dollars surrendered under duress by the individuals who earned them. Okay, taxation is not slavery, but it is extortion.

On the other hand, if the government borrows the money, the Federal Reserve would monetize the debt by inflating the money supply, driving up prices (and distorting the structure of production). Depreciation of the money would constitute a transfer of purchasing power from consumers to bureaucrats. That's just a hard-to-see form of taxation. (By the way, without the power to tax, the government would be unable to borrow.)

Sure, everyone theoretically would eventually get some kind of medical attention (if they lived long enough; you know how government monopolies are), but would the system be worth it in terms of lost liberty and utility? It's not as though free people wouldn't arrange for decent medical services, insurance, mutual-aid associations, and philanthropy if liberated from government domination. (Bulletin: we don't have a free medical system.) 

Sanders and the Medicare-for-all brigade endorse an untenable situation in which two or more sets of people are in a conflict over the same money: those who earned it and those whom the legislators and bureaucrats claim to be serving. We ought to be able to agree that they can't both have a valid claim to the same money. (How could the earners, who include entrepreneurs, business owners, managers, and employees, not be entitled to their earnings?)

For a rights theory to do its job -- which is to define the moral-political zone in which each individual can act and flourish in peace -- rights must be mutually consistent, or compossible, as the political philosopher Hillel Steiner puts it. That means the test of any rights theory is this: could all people exercise their rights simultaneously without conflict? Under classical-liberal natural-rights theory, they could. Under the progressive theory, they could not. Thus the progressive theory fails.

Sanders's view would eviscerate the Lockean principle that each person is an end in himself and not merely a means to other people's ends. Sanders & Co. effectively repudiates self-ownership and the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is really a single right: the right to be free from aggression.

No right to medical care exists. Everyone has a right to engage in peaceful and consensual cooperative activities aimed at obtaining medical care. But a right to medical care per se? No way, not if we value liberty -- and quality medical care.

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Bernie Sanders's Short Memory

During his interview with the New York Daily News, Bernie Sanders was asked to specify the fraud committed by Wall Street banks. He replied:

What kind of fraudulent activity? Fraudulent activity that brought this country into the worst economic decline in its history by selling packages of fraudulent, fraudulent, worthless subprime mortgages. How's that for a start? 

Selling products to people who you knew could not repay them. Lying to people without allowing them to know that in a year, their interest rates would be off the charts. They would not repay that. Bundling these things. Putting them into packages with good mortgages. That's fraudulent activity.

Does Sanders really forget that it was progressives like him who demanded that banks lower lending standards so that low-income people with no, weak, or bad credit histories could get mortgages with low teaser interest rates that would later balloon? Is he ignorant of the fact that these banks had every reason to believe the government would bail them out if they failed? Does he not recall Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises championed by Barney Frank and other progressives, that were right in the middle of this action, knowing they'd be saved if they failed? Has Sanders no memory of mortgage lenders like Countrywide, which were celebrated by progressives for aggressively pushing mortgages on people who could not afford them? Is he unaware that HUD, under Bill Clinton (and Secretary Andrew Cuomo) as well as George W. Bush, enabled people with poor credit and low incomes to "buy" houses with little or no down payment? And finally, is he oblivious of the fact that it was all these government-pushed shaky mortgages that were bundled into the exotic investment instruments Sanders now decries?

I'm pretty sure Sanders is aware of all this. But it doesn't fit his narrative that the Great Recession was entirely the result of private-sector greed, so he can't acknowledge it. Wall Street is properly viewed with suspicion, but what makes that reasonable is that it has long been in cahoots with the national government, notably with federal deposit insurance, which rewards irresponsibility by relieving depositors of the need to judge banks' sobriety or lack thereof.

In other words, Sen. Sanders, Wall Street couldn't have done it alone. It needed people like you.

(For details see Peter Boettke and Steven Horwitz, "The House that Uncle Sam Built.")

Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

On Trade, Sanders and Trump Are Peas in a Rotten Pod

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed.

Sanders and Trump Are Too Establishment on Syria

Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton both want the U.S. government to set up a "safe zone" in Syria to care for refugees from the raging civil war. You may assess their judgment by noting that Secretary of State Clinton and Sen. Rubio also pushed for bombing and regime change in Libya, which was crucial in spreading bin Ladenite mayhem far and wide, and that Rubio thinks knocking out the Sunni Islamic State would hurt Shi'ite Iran.

Sanders Over the Others

If I had the energy for writing about electoral politics, I might have written something like Will Wilkinson has written. (I might still manage to do it.) So read his "Thinking through Your Libertarian Vote." And watch for his Chris Sciabarra-style dialectical analysis. A sample:

I am fairly confident that if I unpacked all of my assumptions in a treatise on the nature of liberty and the dynamics of political economy and democratic public administration, laid out all of my theories of the candidates’ genuine priorities, modeled the likely course of public policy under each contender’s presidency, then ranked all of the candidate’s platforms on my carefully calibrated freedom index, Bernie Sanders would come in first place.

Clinton or Sanders?

If we have to have a president, whom would you prefer: someone who voted for the Iraq war or someone who voted against holding gun manufacturers and gun dealers liable per se for criminal shootings?

Sanders Keeps Blowing it.

Bernie Sanders blows every chance he has to be the peace candidate in the presidential race. The latest example: blaming climate change for terrorism.

The Campaign Needs a Radical, But Sanders Isn't It

We could use a radical in the presidential race -- someone who really challenges the status quo -- but Bernie Sanders isn't it. Sanders of course calls himself a democratic socialist, but that tell us almost nothing. One gets the impression the socialist label was pinned on him and after resisting it, decided socialist sounded romantic and embraced it.

Nevertheless, whether you like socialism or not, Sanders's is not a socialist: he calls neither for nationalizing the means of production nor for replacing the market economy with central planning. Yet that is what socialism came to mean in the mid-20th century. Democratic socialism meant that socialism would be achieved through the ballot box.

It is worth noting that in late 19th- and early 20th-century America, socialism was an umbrella term that was also used by radical free-market, or individualist, anarchists like Benjamin R. Tucker and Francis Dashwood Tandy, who called his 1896 book Voluntary Socialism. A socialist then was anyone who objected that workers were cheated out of their full reward and that prices of goods were fixed above the cost of production; in contrast to state socialists, free-market socialists attributed these evils to "capitalism," by which they meant the system of government privileges for well-connected owners of capital.

What Sanders favors is an expanded welfare/regulatory state, i.e., more of what we have. When asked about socialism, he praises Medicare. Medicare, however, is not socialism, nor would single-payer for all be socialism. Under state-socialized medicine, government would own and operate the hospitals, and doctors and nurses would be government employees -- like the post office without competition. Under single-payer, government would pay the bills for private-sector medical care and impose controls that powerful interests would inevitably manipulate to their advantage. Sound familiar?

The welfare state was established by western ruling classes to tamp down discontent among the powerless that had the potential to turn revolutionary. The father of the modern welfare state, Otto von Bismarck, intended government-administered social insurance to keep the Prussian working class loyal to the regime and out of the Marxist and liberal (libertarian) camps. In England workers initially resisted the welfare state because it was seen as a move by the aristocracy to co-opt the labor movement, which sought to redress its grievances directly.

Sometimes Sanders says that being a socialist means merely that he's neither a Democrat or a Republican. That's not terribly informative. At other times he says it signifies concern about gross income disparities, the high cost of college, and the lack of access to medical care. Again, this doesn't tell us much since radical libertarians share those concerns. What's matters are the solutions. Two people can look at the same social problem and argue over whether the best approach is more government, less government, or no government at all. Sanders's preference, more government, would mean expanded bureaucratic control and special-interest "capture," i.e., more of what already ails us.

In 1986, Sanders said, "All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small 'd.' I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives." Considering that Sanders's program would empower bureaucrats rather than people, one could consistently endorse Sanders's objective while opposing his proposals. (See my "Free-Market Socialism.")

He also said, "What being a socialist means is … that you hold out … a vision of society where poverty is absolutely unnecessary, where international relations are not based on greed … but on cooperation … where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire."

Again, these are objectives that any radical free-market libertarian could embrace. Where Sanders goes wrong is in aiming to empower bureaucrats and politicians.

Sanders cannot or will not see that expanding the welfare/regulatory bureaucracy would not help those outside the ruling elite. Beefing up the state won't liberate us. Despite his intentions, Sanders is an unwitting defender of the status quo.

Where is the radical who will make the case for individual liberation and purely voluntary social cooperation through freed markets?

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society. Become a patron today!

TGIF: Clinton v. Bush in 2016

The more I think about the coming presidential election -- it’s not unreasonable to ask why I think about it at all -- the more I am convinced that the best contest for libertarians would be Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.

Why? Because all we libertarians would need to do is point to the ballot and ask, “Here’s our argument against politics. Need we add anything?”