At the risk of being unkind, here’s the problem with Sen. Bernie Sanders, put in appropriate terms for a candidate whose failing is less his dated socialism than his closed mind: The world has fallen and can’t get off Bernie’s lawn.

The thinking on Sanders breaks into two camps: Fanboys, many with responsible jobs who should know better; and horrified opponents whose critique boils down to mocking “free stuff’’ — Sanders’ promises of Medicare-for-all and free college.

But the real problem with Sanders, as New Hampshire votes Tuesday, is that his thinking is so consistent — consistently shallow. Its hallmark is a suspicion of what’s new, especially when it’s not controlled more or less directly by government. It leaves voters with little reason to be confident that he’ll adapt much to new opportunities, or challenges, for America.

“ Sanders is a broken record in a digital-download age. ”

Put another way, where would innovation come from in Sanders’ America? Entire industries would be organized to his pre-existing liking, and the price of essential products like drugs and gasoline would be, if not set by the government, directly and heavily influenced by it.

Because Bernie knows best. He’ll invent everything we need.

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Let’s stick to four main examples: energy, health care, education and Sanders’ signature issue of breaking up the largest U.S. banks.

Of all the things about Sanders’ unintentionally hilarious speech last month about banks, including his prescriptions for “acceptable” prices of credit cards and automated tellers, the best was this line about pretty much the only thing he’d concede banks should be allowed to do: “We need a banking system that is part of the productive economy — making loans at affordable rates to small and medium-sized businesses so that we create decent-paying jobs.”

How Jeffersonian. Sanders forgot the plot of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where the building-and-loan association making loans to jes’ plain folks is threatened by Mr. Potter, who owns exactly the bank Sanders describes. His solution is no panacea: It merely wills the unpleasantly confusing global economy that larger banks serve out of mind. “Thomas, that’s a real nice declaration,’’ Alexander Hamilton taunts Thomas Jefferson in the musical “Hamilton.” “Welcome to the present; we’re running a real nation.’’

Financial innovation gave us 2008’s financial crisis. It also gave us liquid, cheaper mortgage markets, credit cards, individual retirement accounts and nearly free stock brokerage. To Sanders, it’s all greed from an industry whose “business model is fraud.”

Sanders does like schools: public schools, like the ones he attended until about 1960.

“I’m not in favor of privately run charter schools,” Sanders said last week. “I went to public schools my whole life. Rather than give tax breaks to billionaires, I think we invest in teachers and ... in public education.”

Which is fine, until a local assistant principal explains that if you take your child out of a public school that won’t address his learning differences, he’ll keep your tax money and you’ll pay thousands more to get accommodations that better-run schools provide routinely to everybody.

That had zero to do with billionaires’ taxes, unless I dozed off during Powerball, and everything to do with schools having no competition and truculent unions.

He’d also ban hydraulic fracking, which has rolled real gasoline prices back to 1997 levels and lowered utility rates, indirectly financing renewable power and slashing use of coal, the world’s dirtiest fuel. Because oil companies make too much money, he says. (And they say Sarah Palin doesn’t read the papers.)

People who think like Sanders argue that government plays a crucial role in innovation, often pointing out that the Internet began as a military-communications network.

But the commercial Web didn’t. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told me in 2012 that his business would be impossible without Pentagon R&D. It’s equally true the government would never have thought of Salesforce CRM, -2.42% , Amazon.com AMZN, -2.25% or Netflix NFLX, -2.82% .

Neither would the government have invented life-saving new hepatitis C drugs that will cure as many as 3 million Americans, albeit at $50,000-plus per case even in single-payer systems. It would never have invested the double-digit billions it took to bring them all to market. Sanders demanded that the Veterans Administration ignore drugmakers’ patents less than a year after the drugs hit the market because, surprise, companies put profits ahead of veterans. Never mind that vets were fully covered.

It’s a broken record in a digital-download age.

There are sophisticated cases for holding down drug prices, channeling students into public schools where they live, regulating fracking, even penalizing middle-class suburban car commuters with European-style gasoline taxes.

But Sanders doesn’t do sophisticated cases. He sees no need to give entrepreneurs room to solve problems and raise living standards as they always have.

He’d rather moan that oil companies, banks, drug companies, for-profit hospitals, auto manufacturers and even car-based suburbs are built on fraud, conscious environmental devastation or exploitation. That’s a lot of voters. The argument is tinfoil-hat stuff.

Sanders is a left-wing version of Ronald Reagan going on about “strapping young bucks” on food stamps. And just as boring.

Tim Mullaney writes about economics and investing for MarketWatch.