As I tweeted once during a Democratic debate, "Bernie Sanders' socialism has always been sadly nationalistic." His politics, allegedly concerned with bettering the conditions of the nationally less well off at the expense of the more well off, always seems to cut off compassion at the water's edge.
phil dokas via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA
And not just the compassion of "taking from some by force to give to others" but even the compassion of "allowing things to happen that will overwhelmingly benefit the less well off" around the globe, like doing business with them, buying what they have to sell.
Bernie Sanders is pretty much against that as well, as he revealed in an interview for the New York Daily News conducted last week.
He started off with a pro forma "I'm not anti-trade. We live in a global economy, we need trade."
But he goes on to admit that his version of the only good trade—"fair trade"—has to be based on not trading with any nation whose wages tend to be lower than ours, "renegotiating all of the trade agreements that we have. And by establishing principles that says that what fair trade is about is you are going to take into consideration the wages being paid to workers in other countries….So if you are in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 65¢ an hour, or you're in Malaysia, where many of the workers are indentured servants because their passports are taken away when they come into this country and are working in slave-like conditions, no, I'm not going to have American workers 'competing' against you under those conditions."
In other words, those whose productivity and standard of living make them really among the poor of the earth, President Sanders will make sure no freely chosen action of any American could possibly benefit them via trade, while he works hard to redistribute money from the global top .1 percent to the global 1 percent here in America.
This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the long term: supporting their jobs and economies.
Given that Sanders is a guy who thinks it's better that the government make you line up for rare and precious free bread than that a free and prosperous economy guarantees the wide availability of highly affordable bread in a free market, this should not be surprising, but it's still disgusting.
Elsewhere in the long interview, Sanders showed he pretty literally has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to "breaking up the banks" and "arresting financial executives" even though they are the absolute core of his appeal and message.
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