The latest print issue of National Review offers this assessment of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ economic understanding.
Senator Bernie Sanders has some views about underarm deodorant he’d very much like to share. The proliferation of consumer choices is starving American children: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” he proclaimed. Well … Sanders has fallen victim to a very old and very primitive economic superstition to which men of his socialist ilk are especially vulnerable: the view that free markets are irrational and that if they could only be out under discipline — the discipline of men such as Bernie Sanders — then resources could be reorganized in such a way that all those deodorant choices we don’t need could be reincarnated as healthy snacks for children. Of course the reality is that children are hungry most often where there are few if any consumer choices, e.g., Venezuela, North Korea, and the other socialist wonderlands produced by the policies Senator Sanders prefers. (He honeymooned in the Soviet Union, where varieties of deodorant were presumably pleasingly limited.)
