“A Dose for What Ails Ya”: A Capitalist’s Guide to Voting for Bernie Sanders Agile Possible Follow Feb 22 · 5 min read

Bernie’s surge has come with a lot of new members and their political ideologies aren’t always aligned with Socialism so much as they respect what Bernie’s candidacy and character represent. I think that’s not only okay, its good. I don’t think you have to be a socialist to vote for Bernie. And the movement we need to mobilize to get Bernie elected is too big to be non-pluralist.

In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that even if you’re a fan of capitalism in the abstract, the current manifestation of it isn’t working like it should. And that Bernie’s reforms, when you set-aside any ‘ism for a moment, are just smart corrections to an economic system doomed to failure because of corporate greed. For example, having a broken health care system where an accident at work can easily spiral into bankruptcy — in addition to being an unethical situation — is bad for every kind of economy.

So if you are on the fence about Bernie because he’s a socialist or looking for talking points for friends you know may feel likewise, here are some strong arguments for why everyone should feel the Bern:

1.Bernie’s Policies are not radical — Most of the stuff he’s proposing is pretty common around world, especially in successful capitalist economies. More and more countries do carbon pricing every year. Most countries do single payer and it saves money; the major obstacle in the US is political, not administrative or economic [cite]. An important point about Medicare for All is that it’s NOT government-run health care (where doctors work for the government), its just government-run financing. So providers are still businesses, they just don’t have to deal with 50 different insurers. Private insurance would go away. Not your provider.

If you are interested, please look into more reading about how “radical” many of Bernie’s ideas are. The content of his political message is not radical, the form it takes-on is radical relative to status quo politics. People are getting-out and talking to each other about his policies which is different from previous elections. That, by itself, is a huge advantage to his candidacy. But don’t mistake revolutionary form for wacky policy ideas.

2. Bernie’s policies are consistent with Keynsian economics, though Keynes wasn’t a socialist — John Maynard Keynes was an economist who thought that contrary to classical economic thinking, the state sometimes needed to step-in to ensure institutions that are important to social safety nets. Otherwise, pure laissez-faire capitalism (as little government intervention into the private sector as possible) will end-up stagnating growth because despite large capacity for production, wages can get “stuck” in position. This is thinking behind successful state interventions like medicare/caid and social security. This article explains more at length the economics behind that thinking. This 2016 article is from a good source and gives a balanced take on Bernie as a Keynsian. An important distinction, for example:

[I]t’s important to identify what he doesn’t support. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production,” Sanders said in a speech he delivered last fall, in an attempt to define Democratic Socialism. That position distinguishes Sanders from garden-variety socialists, to say nothing of adherents of communism. While Sanders has no problem with the government taxing or regulating Microsoft, unlike those other groups, he doesn’t believe, either as a moral or practical matter, it should own the company outright. What he does favor is reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes’s vision of the responsibilities of government (and the implications, therein, for capitalism). In “The End of Laissez Faire,” an essay that was adapted from a series of lectures he gave in 1926, Keynes suggested that “progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State.” These “bodies” were distinguished by the fact that their “criterion of action … is solely the public good as they understand it,” and they included institutions such as banks and universities in addition to those services we would traditionally bracket under public utilities.

Basically, Keynes’ idea was that the government needs to step-in for certain public goods because otherwise the private sector would mismanage them and limit growth. The unregulated private sector is incapable of protecting public goods that don’t promise to increase next quarter’s profits.

Some of those public goods include access to affordable health care, education, clean water, etc. And access to those things through upward mobility alone has been strained by decades of wage stagnation. Conditions are extreme enough that increasing the minimum wage, single-payer health care, and a green new deal that makes sure working class folks don’t take the brunt of climate change are necessary forms of economic stimulus to ensure economic activity. That’s why almost all successful capitalist economies have universal health care. This is an interesting read about the inefficient system of US health care.

NOTE 1:A key difference, I think for me and many others, is that health care being a right is enough of a reason for it being universally accessible. I don’t need the economic component of the argument. All the same, people should know that there’s a lot of economic merit to Bernie’s ideas that he doesn’t get credit for.

NOTE 2: I’m sure a lot of folks will have strong opinions about where to situate Bernie ideologically and to be honest, I don’t care to weigh-in. My point isn’t that he’s a Keynsian, just that there’s a Keynsian take on Bernie that can unite people behind his common-sense reforms.

3. There is currently not a “free market” in the US — many markets are rigged by government intervention. The fossil fuel industry is an example, which spills-over into dampening the competitiveness of renewable alternatives that many other countries are already relying on heavily. Big banks bailouts are ongoing and astronomical. Private prisons housing migrants are a particularly tragic instance of a rigged economic system fueled by human tragedy. When Bernie says “there’s already socialism for corporations” he’s telling the truth.

One can be a fan of how capitalism is supposed to work and acknowledge that what we have now is not that. No successful capitalist economy can endure kleptocracy and oligarcy pursued up to the death of democracy.

So while Bernie Sanders may differ from capitalists in political orientation, some of the counter-measures to extreme wealth concentration and wage stagnation that he is proposing are simply common sense.

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You don’t have to be a socialist to vote for Bernie. You don’t even have to be a Keynsian. You just have to believe the American economy needs “a dose for what ails it”.

Bernie getting elected won’t switch’ America to being a socialist economy all of a sudden. It will implement some reforms that are smart and necessary at this point in time. And if you want to vote for someone else in 4 years, that as always is your choice.

But if you’re an avowed capitalist, I think there’s very good reasons to vote for Bernie in this election. Its not an economic revolution, its an economic update. Its a political revolution because the motivation among members of this movement is radically different than what we’ve come to learn of political participation in the last many election cycles.

And that alone should be reason to prefer Bernie to even a qualified advocate for Keynsian reforms like Senator Elizabeth Warren because his movement’s capacity to mobilize can ensure a high chance of actually creating those policy outcomes.

Thanks for reading and if you are new to or considering joining the movement to get Bernie elected, I hope you will.

Originally published at https://www.reddit.com/.