Tuesday, February 25, 2020

breaking up banks & tech firms to generate more market competition isn't a socialist policy. it's a policy that is capitalist to it's bones. socialists would argue for the exact opposite policy - we would argue that competition hurts workers. 

nor is universal healthcare something that you need to invoke socialism to get to. it's true that it's the kind of thing that the framers of capitalism would have realized should be kept off of the market, and that the fact that it ended up on the market is a part of the socialist argument against the failure of capitalism, but if you want to invoke these "real capitalist" debates that are underlying sanders' economic positions, you should quickly get to the deduction that the health care industry is a natural monopoly, and that flailing against it is just going to lead to market failure. there is a perfectly coherent capitalist argument against market-based health care on strictly classical grounds, and if you listen to sanders closely, it's actually the argument he's advancing.

and we could go on. i won't.