So You Want Sanders, Eh? « The Burning Platform

So You Want Sanders, Eh? « The Burning Platform

Guest Post by Karl Denninger

Seriously?

Just days after a New Hampshire poll showed Hillary Clinton slipping further behind Bernie Sanders in the vital early primary state, a fresh survey shows the Vermont senator narrowly edging ahead of her in Iowa as well.

The Quinnipiac University poll shows Sanders leading Clinton 41-40 percent.

Let me point out Bernie’s own statement on his political beliefs:

Representative Spencer Bachus is one of the only people I know from Alabama. I bet I’m the only socialist he knows. I’m certainly the only one the congressman from Birmingham could name after darkly claiming that there are 17 socialists lurking in the House of Representatives.

I doubt that there are any other socialists, let alone 17 more, in all of the Congress.

Bernie’s words, not mine or some news outlet that (might) have twisted them, from 2009.

What is socialism?  It’s the public ownership of the means of production — that is land, machinery, raw materials and labor.

It is fundamentally the right of others — specifically, Bernie and others in the political class — to dictate what you do with those means of production, should you acquire them, and the price at which they trade in the marketplace.

It is a declaration that (in the context of alleged “democratic socialism”) your right of control over said means of production is limited to expression via a vote which does not have the binding force of law, as there has never in American history been any legally-enforceable means of enforcing what is promised during and via political campaigns.

The political class, whether Democrat, Republican or otherwise, all claim to know what is “good” for both you and the nation as a whole.  They, in fact, insist that they’re smarter than you are in all respects — with regard to your economic decisions, your political decisions and your social decisions.  They pass laws that demand your compliance with all of the above, under penalty of fine, imprisonment or even death.

Both sides of the aisle eschew faithful adherence to the founding documents of this nation.  The Constitution is not a grant of privileges to you as a citizen; it is a small and confined list of privileges afforded government, with everything else being reserved to you.

Think long and hard about this nation and your place in it folks.  Sanders is popular because he promises you the fruits of other people’s slavery on a literal basis.  The problem is that he can’t deliver it and neither can anyone else.

The Soviet Union and the people there believed they could deliver on this promise and they sent a lot of people to the gulag who refused to cooperate.  It didn’t matter; even the threat of exile to Siberia was ineffective as while you might be able to force people to work controlling the quality of output is far more difficult since physical and emotional abuse degrade output quality rather than improve it.  Ultimately the Soviet Union collapsed, as has every other attempt at this sort of political system over time.

What’s worse, however, is that you, by embracing Sander’s principles of political theory, define yourself as a monster no different than the tyrants that have littered history.

It is monstrous to demand that others produce so you may have.

It is even more-monstrous when you take what others produce at gunpoint, via “legal compulsion” or otherwise, so you may have without producing — and it matters not whether your failure to produce on your own is intentional or due to unfortunate circumstance.

But leaving aside your willingness to embrace monstrosity you cannot succeed by taking from those have found success via force, irrespective of the means of force you choose.  You can only damage or even destroy their willingness to seek success in the future, which inevitably means there is less to go around over time — not more.

It may be true that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King, but that does not change the fact that without binocular vision to determine the range of an enemy the Lion, who refuses to blind himself in the name of “equality”, eats all of you — including the King.