If you thought Joe Biden must have some
kind of mental problem to say that 150 million people had been killed by guns
in the hands of random shooters, you should consider what Bernie Sanders has
been saying.
Bernie hopes to raise the trillions
needed for The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and the forgiveness of student
loans, by such means as suing the fossil energy firms. Bernie knows that at
current market values all these firms taken together are worth trillions.
He plans to make their activities illegal and yet collect
those trillions. He hasn’t asked who would buy their assets if their use is illegal.
All that he would be able actually to collect is their cash and marketable
securities and the scrap value of the rest of their assets.
The disastrous plunge in the value of their assets would be
accompanied by a comparable plunge in the average standard of living in the
United States. People would be deprived of gasoline, heating oil, and all other
such products and products whose production depends on them.
Bernie and his followers do not see the enormous positive
contribution that fossil fuels have made both to the number of people able to
survive and to the quality of life of virtually all who do. His program is that
of a suicidal, murderous moron/maniac.
Sanders is openly calling for a revolution!
(See https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1228009835880423426?s=20)
Sanders
wants a revolution in order to impose an insane program of government
manipulation of the world’s climate by means of sacrificing Industrial
Civilization.
Imposing
such a program would cause enormous impoverishment and suffering, culminating
in mass death, and it would require a totalitarian dictatorship to prevent a
counter-revolution.
Sanders is no Scandinavian Social Democrat. He, AOC, and all
the other supporters of the “Green New Deal” are advocates of a program that
cannot be imposed and maintained other than by revolution and dictatorship.
This is why everyone who owns a gun should keep it, and why everyone
who doesn’t own a gun should buy one.
The Walton family
(the owners of Walmart) is currently worth about $190 billion. The Koch Brothers
and Mars families (candy bars) are both worth over $100 billion. Such facts are
intolerable to socialists, communists, “progressives,” and, sad to say, today’s
Democrats.
Bernie [Senator Bernie Sanders] wants a tax
of 77% on estates over $1 billion. He relishes the prospect of the Waltons
having to pay $147 billion in estate taxes.
Bernie and his
followers simply don’t know that the wealth of capitalists is not in their refrigerators,
pantries, and wardrobe closets, and not even in their automobiles or homes. IT’S
IN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION.
The means of
production are the foundation of the supply of goods that everyone buys and of
the demand for the labor that wage earners sell. The greater this wealth,
the more abundant and lower priced is the supply of goods and the higher is the
demand for labor and thus wages.
For example, the Walmart family’s fortune is invested in 11,000+
stores, each one of which is full of vast amounts of merchandise and requires a
large building and plot of land. $191 billion are easily accounted for by an average
investment of less than $17.4 million per store.
In addition, these stores employ a total of 2.1 million
workers, more than two-thirds of them in the US. If their average wage,
including benefits, was just $400 per week, this would imply a weekly payroll
of $840 million and an annual payroll of $42 billion.
Walmart’s main contribution to wages, however, is not
through its payrolls, but through its low prices. Its low prices increase the
buying power of wages throughout the economic system.
It thus raises the real wages of the tens of millions of
workers who are its customers or who are the customers of other retailers who
charge lower prices because of the competition that Walmart gives them.
Bernie and his gang want to take away the equivalent of more
than three-fourths of these stores and correspondingly reduce Walmart’s contribution to the
supply of goods and demand for labor. Thus, they want to largely undo the lower
prices and higher real wages that Walmart is responsible for.
To whatever extent the wages that Walmart pays its workers may
be low, those wages will be lower still if Bernie and his gang can seize three-fourths of
them to spend on their cockamamie schemes. Walmart (every business) makes wages
higher than they would have been without its payrolls.
Bernie’s spokesman refers to Walmart’s workers’ wages being
so low that the government has to subsidize their housing, food, and
healthcare. (See http://bit.ly/31VsjnQ.) In reality, of course, the government doesn’t have to do any of these things.
The fact that it does so and largely pays for it with funds
that otherwise would have been spent on means of production and wage payments,
thereby keeping prices up and wages down, is exactly the sort of thing that keeps
workers poor.
Workers are kept poor because ignorant politicians like
Bernie are constantly preventing them from being better off. They enact laws,
such as minimum wage and pro-union legislation, that prevent employers from
employing workers they otherwise would have employed.
In particular, these laws prevent less capable workers from
successfully competing with more capable workers. For example, a half-as-productive
worker can outcompete an average worker if his wage is less than half, but not
if it’s compelled to be more than half, let alone equal.
Compelling employers to provide benefits or improvements in
working conditions that don’t pay for themselves reduces workers’ take-home
pay. Instead of being paid a wage equal to the employer’s cost of employing them,
they’re paid a wage that is less by these extra costs.
Bernie and his gang believe that because the Walton family
is rich, Walmart can afford to do whatever Bernie et al. would like it to do,
such as raise wages to $15 per hour.
Actually, apart from a relatively small cash reserve,
Walmart has already spent all of its money and doesn’t have the means of
substantially increasing its expenditures until additional sales revenues come
in. It’s spent its money in building and stocking its stores.
Walmart could borrow. The Walton family could sell some of
its shares and make a gift of the proceeds to Walmart. The effect of that would
be to deprive other firms of the use of the funds involved, i.e., to reduce
their demand for means of production and labor.
Bernie wants us to fear billionaires. Actually, the billionaires
work for us—for the great mass of average people. They want to acquire money
from us. Unlike the government, they cannot simply come and seize our money.
We have to want to give it to them, because we value what we
receive more than the money. They have to make their product such that we will
value it more than the money they ask. One of the best examples is a delicious
Snickers or Milky Way bar for a mere dollar.
Any force in connection with such a voluntary transaction
would be force to prevent it, not to compel it. Bernie and his gang know only the
gun and the club. They want to destroy the free market and replace it with the
brute force of socialism.
For an introduction to what’s wrong with socialism and right
with capitalism, read my essay whose title appears directly below. It’s
available for 99¢ at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu.
For an in-depth,
comprehensive explanation of the workings of capitalism and critique of
Marxism/Socialism, read my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.
It’s available
at http://amzn.to/2PM19ut in both Kindle and hardcover formats and at www.capitalism.net in both hardcover and
as a free non-printable, non-copyable pdf replica capable of download.
ADDENDUM: Bernie’s spokesman kept stressing how rapidly the
Walton’s et al. gained financially. The most important part of these gains was
the result of the saving and reinvestment of profits made on the basis of lower
costs and better products, and doing this on a growing base.
But a substantial part was also the result of a flood of new
and additional money and credit manufactured by the Federal Reserve System and pouring
into the stock market and driving up stock prices.
This process is a government racket. It causes both
financial gains and higher prices. The financial gains are taxed. The after-tax
gains are then insufficient to buy as much at the higher prices as the original
capital could buy at the original prices.
This principle applies within the operations of business
firms and is a major reason for the economic stagnation of the last two
generations. Alongside large paper profits has been a reduced ability to buy
capital goods and labor at prices that rise more than do after-tax funds.
