Bernie Sanders has identified problems like increased costs of healthcare, rising student loan debt, and the financial crisis of 08. Unfortunately Bernie thinks the cure for these problems can only come from the very entity that caused the problems in the first place, and that is government and the Federal Reserve. He is like a doctor who finds his patient has lung cancer, and thinks the cure is to smoke more cigarettes. He doesn’t understand that cigarettes caused the cancer in the first place. Government intervention has caused the rising costs of healthcare and college education, and the Feds easy money policies caused the financial crisis. More Government intervention can’t fix these problems it can only make them worse. Individuals making decisions in free markets will improve these problems. I didn’t say free markets would lead to a perfect “solution”, because there can be no perfect solution when human beings are involved. Free markets allow individuals to make trade offs between competing values. In other words markets don’t proscribe one size fits all solutions, that’s what government does. The difference is when government “solutions” don’t work, government gets credit for trying to solve the problem and is given perpetual do overs, while markets are demonized for doing exactly what they are supposed to do (allow individuals to make decisions).
In this article, Bernie, It’s Government That “Rigs” The Economy, at mises.org, Tho Bishop explains that most problems are blamed on the market economy when in fact it’s government intervening in the free market that causes these problems. Here are some excerpts from the article.
“Touching back on Sanders’s indictment of Wall Street regarding the financial crises, perhaps no entity is more responsible for “rigging” the economy than the Federal Reserve — which not only enabled much of Wall Street’s reckless borrowing in the lead up to the crisis, but actively sought to inflate the stock market (at the expense of risk-averse savers) following it. While, to his credit, Sanders has supported the full audit of the Federal Reserve long advocated for Ron Paul, he has fully advocated for the Fed to double down on these very same policies.”
“In fact, almost every example the left points to regarding a “rigged economy” can be directly linked to the State. Be it Pharma Bro and the broken pharmaceutical industry, or the cost of healthcare in America, or the burden of student loans being felt by Millennials across the country, the market is blamed for the sins of government. Capitalism is demonized for the evils of interventionism.”
As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action:
“[Advocates of government intervention] blame the market economy for the consequences of the very anticapitalistic policies which they themselves advocate as necessary and beneficial reforms. They fix on the market economy the responsibility for the inevitable failure and frustration of interventionism.”
“Unfortunately this anti-capitalist mentality continues to dominate politics today. Until that changes, politicians like Sanders will continue to find success demonizing a rigged economy they bear personal responsibility for creating.”
Related Article – Free Market Fracking Trumps Government Solutions When It Comes To Producing Energy, at austrianaddict.com.
Related Article – Solutions To California’s Drought: Government Fines Or Market Prices, at austrianaddict.com.
Related Article – Economic Forces Eventually Win: Let’s Look At Oil, at austrianaddict.com.
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT 