Bernie wants to raise taxes and it's going to hurt

The website I Like Bernie, But..., created in 2016 and updated for 2019, tries to calm people's fears about Bernie Sander's socialist extremism.  It states questions reflecting concerns that people might have about Bernie, and then provides pithy little answers refuting those fears.

In a previous post, I addressed the myriad falsehoods, omissions, and misconceptions in the website's assurance that Bernie isn't a dangerous socialist, he's a good socialist. This post addresses the misleading answer to a concern that "I heard he [Bernie] wants to raise taxes."

Here's what I Like Bernie, But.... has to say about Bernie and taxes:

 That's simply false. Here's the truth:

To fund his proposed $97.5 trillion in spending over the decade after his election, Bernie must tax everybody and tax them hard.  This is not a Republican viewpoint.  Back in 2016, when Bernie’s goals were less grandiose, Vox, a internet media outlet known for its strong Progressive orientation, examined Bernie’s plans and found them wanting.

Dylan Matthews imagined how the Tax Code would look if Bernie is allowed to go forward with his plans to socialize medicine; make college free for everyone; revamp America's infrastructure; have the government create jobs for young people, a ridiculous scheme that Milton Friedman destroys with a single question about spoons; expand Social Security, a program that is already going broke and sucking vast amounts of money out of the federal budget; and a whole bunch of other, smaller programs. Before I get to his specific conclusions, though, let's talk about the bigger picture.

The first thing you need to understand, before we even get to the numbers, is that if you imposed a 100% tax rate on every single "rich" person in America (from the super-rich to the pretty darn comfortable), you might be able to fund Bernie's plans for a month or so.  Even if you followed  that up by then confiscating all the assets from these same "rich" people, you still wouldn't be able to pay for even a fraction of Bernie's plans.

Don't believe me?  Check out this video made when the Occupy Protesters started demanding that the 1% pay for everything. As you’ll see, Bernie’s demands can’t exist in the real world:

If you don't have time to watch this 9 minute video, you can get the same information from a clear and funny post entitled "Feed Your Family on $10 Billion a Day."  Whether you watch the video or read the post, you will learn more about actual money than you will if you spent weeks following Bernie around listening to his economically ignorant statements about money and wealth.

After watching the video or reading the post, you will know with absolute certainty that "the rich" cannot fund Bernie's grandiose plans.  That means that other people are going to be tapped for money -- and you might be surprised at how far down the economic food chain that tapping goes.  Let's go back to that Vox article (remember, this is a Progressive publication from 2016, when Bernie’s plans were slightly lower dollar), to see what even Left leaning out let has to say.

Matthews notes that Bernie likes to throw out big, conclusory answers when he's asked where the money will come from for his plans:

And for every plan, he's got an idea to pay for it. College? Slap a financial transactions tax on Wall Street. Infrastructure? Tax corporations on profits they earn abroad. Single-payer? Raise income and payroll taxes, and then a bunch of others too.
 While Sanders tends to portray these as separate ideas with separate financing, I thought it'd be worth adding them up and seeing what the tax code looks like with all of them. I looked specifically at his changes to personal income, payroll, and capital gains tax rates. 

What Matthews discovered when he "looked specifically" at Bernie's tax changes is that all Americans will need to pay more taxes -- often significantly more taxes from those who can least afford them -- to finance Bernie Sander's dream of a government that will provide everything for everybody.  For clarity's sake, Matthews leads with a graphic showing that everybody will be paying marginal increases on their taxes, whether they can afford it or not (and keep in mind that this graphic is from 2016, not 2019):

  

There's no doubt that those making more than $250,000 a year will bear the greatest burden under the new tax scheme: 

Most taxpayers would see a single-digit increase in their marginal tax rate. People with taxable income below $250,000 would see an 8.8 percentage point increase.
 But the very rich would see eye-popping increases in marginal rates: from 36.8 percent to 62 percent for people with taxable income between $250,000 and $413,350. The big change here is applying the Social Security payroll tax, which adds another 12.4 points.
 For the very richest Americans, with more than $10 million in taxable income, Sanders's proposal would produce a 77 percent marginal rate. That's not unprecedented — under Dwight Eisenhower, the top income tax rate was 91 percent — but it's higher than the top rate at any point since 1964. 

If you're wondering, there's a reason that America did away with those top rates back in 1964:  High top rates don't bring in more money.  The reality is that the rich are better than anyone at protecting their money from what they perceive as unreasonable income taxes.  They take it offshore, shelter it, hide it and, most importantly, refuse to invest it, leaving their wealth unavailable to the rest of the country for such useful things as business start-ups, employment, exploring innovative ideas, etc.

The clearest representation of the damage too-high taxes do to an economy is the "Laffer Curve," which Art Laffer came up with more than 40 years ago.  It's a simple premise:  If you make it too expensive for people to make money, they'll stop making money.  Here's a more comprehensive explanation: 

As drawn, the Laffer Curve shows that at a tax rate of 0%, the government would collect no tax revenue, just as it would collect no tax revenue at a tax rate of 100% because no one would be willing to work for an after-tax wage of zero. The reason for this is that tax rates have two effects on revenues: one is arithmetic, the other economic. The arithmetic effect is static, meaning that if rates are lowered, the tax revenues per dollar of tax base will be lowered by the amount of the decrease in the rate, and vice versa for increasing tax rates. In other words, this is what happens when a hypothetical 1% tax collects $1 million, so people assume that a 2% tax would collect $2 million… and a 5% tax would collect $5 million. Likewise, under the same scenario people would similarly assume that a .5% tax rate reduction would collect only $500,000. 

And here's a helpful visual: 

That's all very easy to say in theory, but how does the Laffer Curve really work in fact?  Well, it turns out that, when put to the test of real world economics, the Laffer Curve performs as predicted: 

Solid supporting evidence came during the Reagan years. President Ronald Reagan adopted the Laffer Curve message, telling Americans that when 70 to 80 cents of an extra dollar earned goes to the government, it’s understandable that people wonder: Why keep working? He recalled that as an actor in Hollywood, he would stop making movies in a given year once he hit Uncle Sam’s confiscatory tax rates.
 When Reagan left the White House in 1989, the highest tax rate had been slashed from 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent. (Even liberal senators such as Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum voted for those low rates.) And contrary to the claims of voodoo, the government’s budget numbers show that tax receipts expanded from $517 billion in 1980 to $909 billion in 1988 — close to a 75 percent change (25 percent after inflation). Economist Larry Lindsey has documented from IRS data that tax collections from the rich surged much faster than that.
 Reagan’s tax policy, and the slaying of double-digit inflation rates, helped launch one of the longest and strongest periods of prosperity in American history. Between 1982 and 2000, the Dow Jones industrial average would surge to 11,000 from less than 800; the nation’s net worth would quadruple, to $44 trillion from $11 trillion; and the United States would produce nearly 40 million new jobs.
 Critics such as economist Paul Krugman object that rapid growth during the Reagan years was driven more by conventional Keynesian deficit spending than by reductions in tax rates. Except that 30 years later, President Obama would run deficits as a share of GDP twice as large as Reagan’s through traditional Keynesian spending programs, and the economy grew under Obama’s recovery only half as fast. 

And to give a current spin to the blessings of the Reagan economy, just look at what happened to the American economy under Trump’s tax reform: 

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its state-level jobs report today for the Month of November [2019], providing 23 months of employment information to track how the Tax Cut and Jobs Act may have shaped job growth trends across America. The results strongly suggest that the 27 low tax states (with average SALT deductions below $10,000 in 2016) are significantly outperforming the 23 high tax states and the District of Columbia (where filers claimed more than $10,000 in SALT deductions).
 From December 2017 to November 2019, the low tax states added nonfarm payrolls at a rate 93.8% greater than the high tax states. Nonfarm jobs include those in the government sector. Limiting the scope of job growth to the private sector, where small business owners’ decisions on when and where to grow their businesses are directed affected by the tax code, shows and even larger job creation advantage for the low tax states, with a 97.9% higher rate of job growth in the past 23 months. Capital-intensive manufacturing shows an even larger disparity, with the rate of manufacturing jobs growing 3.3% in the low tax states compared to 1.3% in the high tax states, a massive 151% disparity in favor of the low tax states. In the past 12 months, the difference in manufacturing job growth is an astounding 1,209% advantage in favor of the low tax states. This may be because manufacturing facilities take longer to get up and running than do other sectors such as retail, with the effect of the tax cut being slower to manifest in this sector.
 The table below shows the percentage of jobs added in three categories, nonfarm, private sector, and manufacturing over three time periods, since President Trump was sworn in in January 2017, since the passage of the tax cut in December 2017, and over the past 12 months. 

All of this boils down to a single point:  If Bernie's tax plan goes into effect, over time there will be less money available to the government, not more.  People will earn less, create less, innovate less, spend less, and invest less.  It just won't be worth it.

For the first year or two of the new, higher tax rates, the rates will look successful because they'll sweep in money already created through investing, earning, innovation, etc.  After that, though, the tax revenues will slide steadily as the economy becomes more and more sluggish.

I assume that, at this point, some people will point out that the real benefit of Trump’s economy is only for those rich enough to invest in the booming stock market. That’s not true, and you can see why if you compare the Trump economy to the Obama economy.

During the Obama years, it's true that the stock market did grow. However, if you were really paying attention, you might have noticed that the boom was entirely unrelated to job creation and other signs of a thriving economy.

What's happened is that, in a high regulation, high tax, unstable environment, the rich, rather than investing (and risking) their money in job and wealth creation, were just storing it in the stock market, waiting for a sign that investment will be less risky.  For everyone else -- that is, for businesses and their employees -- stagnation was the name of the game, whether in the number of jobs available or in the salaries people could earn.

Compare this to Trump’s low tax and fewer regulations economy, and you can see that the stock market rise has been accompanied by rising wages and more available jobs. Most importantly, the greatest wage benefit from Trump's economy has flowed to the lowest wage earners -- that is, it's not just the stock market investors making bank.

If we were to reverse the Trump gains and embrace Bernie's proposed capital gains tax (going from an already high, compared to Europe, rate of 23.8% to a new high of 64.2% at the very top), most investment would stop altogether.

Again, don't believe me (a conservative); believe Vox, a Progressive publication: 

The Sanders campaign estimates they'll earn $92 billion a year from taxing capital gains the same as wages. But there's reason to think they'll actually lose revenue.
 One thing that happens when you increase the capital gains rate is that people stop selling assets — and thus realizing gains on capital that can be taxed — as frequently. That means there's a point beyond which raising the capital gains tax would reduce sales so much that revenue actually falls.
 Note that this is a very different question from whether taxing capital gains at a high rate hurts economic growth. Many economists think it does, but that effect would reduce revenue by lowering the price at which assets are sold, not making them less likely to be sold in the first place. The latter is a different effect whose existence is much less controversial. 

By the way, if you're tired of hypotheticals and what to see what it looks like in places where Bernie's financial plans have already been put into effect, look around the world:  In the years after World War II, Europe looked like a strong economy that also managed to be socialist. What this ignored was that (a) Europeans were having babies to repopulate after World War II; (b) America paid for Europe to rebuild its infrastructure; and (c) America paid for most of Europe's defense costs. Going into the 21st century, though, Europe had a declining birth rate, the infrastructure benefit had gone away with time; and, with the end of the Cold War, America stopped pouring so much money into European defense and the European economy.

So it is that, in the 21st century, most of Europe is having economic problems thanks to the withdrawal of American Cold War funding, the 2008 recession, the dramatic drop in birth rates, and the influx of immigrants who drew on the system without funding it, all of which made it impossible for European countries to continue what was essential a Ponzi scheme, whereby they kept taxing the up-and-coming generation of workers to pay for the perks accorded older people. Add to this hyper-regulation from the EU, which makes conducting business very difficult, and you can see why Europe's system isn't so admirable anymore.

An even better example of what happens when you implement Bernie's tax policies is Venezuela, which had such a rapid decline after socialization that you can see the Bernie-style problems playing out before your eyes.  Venezuela implemented Bernie's socialism a few years ago and went from being one of the most prosperous Latin American nations (thanks to oil revenue) to being flat-out broke, with shortages of everything from food to toilet paper to (ironically) oil.

Government manages money very badly.  When you have your own money, you presumably worked hard for it and depend a great deal on it. You'll therefore be careful with it, and quite possibly want to do things that make you earn more of it.

Government is different.  The government bureaucrats who are making decisions about and spending your money didn't earn that money.  They won't be affected if they spend it unwisely.

Worse, when they run out of your money thanks to unwise management, these bureaucrats don’t have to do what ordinary people do, which is either to cut spending or work even harder to pay bills. Instead, they just have to demand more from you, since they have the vast punitive power of the government at their back to take that money from you.  (Robin Hood, incidentally, didn't steal from the rich; he stole from the tax collectors, and gave the money back to the taxpayers.)

And one final point about those government bureaucrats:  As a friend reminded me, F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom makes the point that it doesn't matter how good, honest, and caring the manager is.  There is simply no way for one person or government department to accumulate enough knowledge about what's going on in the economy for that person or department to make good decisions.

Even with powerful computers and all the technology of the 21st Century, the knowledge needed to make smart economic decisions is so diffused through the country and the population that shortages WILL occur....and then the attempt to deal with them will make things worse, and so on and on, ad infinitum.

Here's the bottom line:  Governments do not create wealth.  The only way they get money is to take it from people who have earned it.  They then hand that money out to favored constituencies, picking winners and losers as they go.  Invariably, because government is slow, inefficient, and cares more about reward friends and punishing enemies than profits and losses, the money dribbles away, having enriched a few and impoverished many.

At the end of the day when the government takes it upon itself to be the money manager -- to suck up everyone's wealth through constantly increasing taxes, and then itself to run the businesses and make the calls -- everyone ends up poorer.  Just ask the people in Venezuela.

(You can find the first post in this series, about why it's a bad thing that Bernie is a socialist, at Bookworm Room or at I Don't Like Bernie, Because.)

(This post updates a post from February 2016.)

Isn't Bernie a socialist? Why, yes, he is and that's bad.

Contrary to the promise in a pro-Bernie website that socialism is great, it's not: It destroys economies and makes people prisoners of their own government.

The website I Like Bernie, But..., which was created in 2016 and has been updated for 2019, takes it upon itself to answer concerned readers who ask "Isn't Bernie a socialist?" It assures these people that Bernie isn't a socialist socialist. Instead, he's a democratic socialist, which the website promises is something entirely different:

The above conclusions are just wrong, and they're so very wrong that they need to be corrected and explained in a lot of paragraphs.  Here goes:

To begin with, you need to understand what it really means to be a socialist.  Only then can you understand that putting the word "democratic" in front of "socialist" doesn't change anything.

So, what is a "socialist" system?  Think of the realm of available politics as a line moving from left to right.  On the far left side are totalitarian regimes, which means government has all the control and the people have none.  At the far right side is anarchy, which means there is no government at all, although the resulting chaos usually means that people have no control either.  (Ironically, anarchy usually ends when a strong man takes over and creates a totalitarian regime.)

All political systems fall somewhere along that line.  The further to the Left they are, the more likely it is that power is centralized, and the further to the Right they are, the more likely it is that there is minimal centralized power, leaving more power with individuals.

Socialism, by definition, is a system that vests power in the government.  The government owns or exercises control over all of the means of production, as well as all of the things produced.  All people work under government control and all goods and services are handed out pursuant to government mandate.

Theoretically, in a socialist country, the people and the government are one and the same. The reality, though, is that you can't have millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of people in management.

What actually happens, therefore, is that all power resides in a tightly-controlled government group that makes all decisions about everything.  It decides what the country as a whole will build, produce, sell, etc.  As part of this, the government has to control every aspect of citizens' lives, in order to make sure that its social and economic goals are met.

Over the last 100 years, socialism has taken on many guises, from hard to soft.  In today's world, North Korea, which vests all power in one member of one ruling family, is socialism's most extreme face.  We know that hundreds of thousands of people who have displeased the regime live in concentration camps where those who survive work as slaves.

A small percentage of those North Korean citizens who are connected to the ruling party live good lives, with food, shelter, and other creature comforts.  The military is heavily supported, because socialist dictatorships are paranoid.  But for everyone else -- well, famine is a common occurrence in North Korea because, as you'll see repeatedly in socialist countries, government types are horrible economic managers.

The government also fears its citizens (because it treats them so badly), so the government spies upon them constantly and punishes them brutally for even the smallest infractions.  When you concentrate all power in one entity -- that is, all police and military power -- you're going to have an entity that can do a great deal of harm, both at home and abroad.

The former Soviet Union wasn't much better back in the day than North Korea is now.  In its heyday, the Soviet politburo controlled every aspect of people's lives.  During the 1930s, when Stalin headed the nation, he decided that the Kulaks in Ukraine, who were small farmers with privately owned farms, had to be destroyed to make way for large collective farms run under government control.

When the Kulaks refused to cooperate with Stalin's grand plan, he used his vast government power to steal their grain and starved them to death.  Millions died.

During the 1950s through the 1980s, China had the same repressive government as North Korea and the Soviet Union.  During the 1960s, when Chairman Mao announced his Great Leap Forward, which was intended to take China from a medieval economy to a modern one in around five years, tens of millions of people died because of starvation, torture, slave labor, and execution.  Low estimates say that 40-50 million died.  High estimates say that as many as 75-100 million died. (Because China was such a tightly closed society, there are really no photographs.)

Even today, the Chinese communist government is utterly cavalier about individual rights. It arrests and jails journalists; imprisons millions of Muslims, using them as slave labor and raping the women; harvests organs from prisoners for profit; uses slave labor to help drive the Chinese economy; and is using bullets to destroy the efforts Hong Kong’s citizens are making to preserve their democratic institutions (something the Chinese government promised to protect when it took over Hong Kong’s governance in 1997).

The Nazis, whom everyone today accuses of being on the "right," were also socialists -- that is, people from the, totalitarian, Left side of that political spectrum you see above.  The Nazi party's full name was the "National Socialist German Workers' Party."  Where Nazi Germany differed from a hardcore communist country like the Soviet Union, China, or North Korea, was that the government didn't take over all the businesses and homes.  Instead, it allowed businesses and homes to stay in private hands -- as long as the government made all economic decisions and controlled all aspects of people’s lives.

The socialist system the Nazi used is called “fascism.” The first fascist government was in Italy, under Benito Mussolini, back in the 1920s. Mussolini defined socialist fascism this way: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Today, people think fascism is not related to socialism or communism because Hitler ended up going to war against the Soviet Union. Thus, people reason that, if communism is “left” and Hitler went to war against the communists, than fascism must be “right” and “right-wing” politics must therefore be bad. The reality is quite different.

Hitler hated communism, not because it was the complete opposite of his fascism socialism, but because it was too similar. The fight between communism and fascism, both of which were children of socialism, was like a sibling rivalry within the same family. The important point is to  note that both systems were agreed upon one thing: The government should be in total charge of all aspects of the economy and should completely control people’s decisions and their lives.

Because the Nazi’s socialist system meant that, despite private property, the government was running things, people had no choice but to go along with the program.  Those who didn't were imprisoned or killed.  While there’s nothing wrong with love of country (i.e., “nationalism”), if you add nationalism to fascism, and then blend in anti-Semitism and the Nietzschean idea of a “master race,” all of which is presided over by a crazed megalomaniac . . . well, you suddenly have a government engine primed to think it's entitled to and can achieve world domination. Additionally, because socialist governments are lousy economic managers, eventually they always have to look over their border to other people's wealth and labor to survive.

Modern Europe has been the softest side of socialism – it’s like Nazism without the toxic master race idea and the quest for world domination.  European countries have let people have their own businesses and homes but have kept tight control over services such as health care, railways, and heavy industry (coal mining, steel production). They also bury their citizens under regulations.  Every single aspect of life in a modern European socialist country is regulated.

For a long time, Europeans thought they'd found the perfect solution with this "loving" socialism.  Their citizens could run their own businesses and make money, so they had some economic growth.  In addition, in exchange for extremely high taxes, the citizens got "free" medical care (which they'd prepaid with their taxes), low-cost train and bus fares, and good elder care.  It all looked so beautiful in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. That mid- to late-20th century vision of European socialism is what so many of today's American Democrats, Progressives, and Democratic Socialists believe they can bring to America.

What the Europeans conveniently forgot, and what Americans have never thought about is, is that after World War II, it was American money that rebuilt their infrastructure.  This meant that Europeans didn't have to repay capital investments. Their capital infrastructure was delivered to them intact and ready to go thanks to American money.

Europeans also liked to ignore that, during the entirety of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, America paid Europe's defense costs.  That allowed them to spend their own tax revenues on the "free" medical care and cheap train fare that Europeans love to boast about as a sign of their superiority.  To this day, no European nation boasting about its “socialized” or “single payer” medicine will acknowledge that European countries never had "free" medical care -- they had American-funded medical care.

Maggie Thatcher, who was the conservative Prime Minister in England during the 1980s, famously said "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."  In Europe, American money started vanishing when the Cold War ended. Not only did American money start drying up in the 1990s, Europe found itself with a few other problems when it came to maintaining its "friendly" socialism:

(1) Its population began to age. People in socialist countries tend to have fewer children. In Europe, fertility rates are below population replacement rates. The aging population was draining the social welfare system, because they needed medical and elder care, and there were fewer young people to create wealth to sustain that same system, a problem that continues today.

(2) The 2008 recession affected the entire world's money supply, decreasing drastically the wealth in Europe. Europe still has not recovered economically.

(3) Europe invited in millions of immigrants who were not on board with the social compact that controlled European socialism. In the years after WWII, Europeans collectively understood that, if everyone worked when young, then everyone would be cared for when sick or old (at least as long as the Americans took care of the defense bill).  The problem was/is that the new immigrants, primarily from Africa and the Middle East, didn't sign onto this compact.  They came, got welfare, and stayed on welfare, letting the Europeans work for them. Again, this is an ongoing European problem, especially given the huge influx of Middle Eastern and African refugees who started to arrive in 2015.

European socialism is in big trouble now that money is tight, the population is old, and the immigrants are continuing to pour in, taking without first having given.

By the way, the semi-socialist programs we Americans have, such as Medicare or Social Security, are also running on empty.  The younger generation is just barely paying enough in taxes to keep those programs funding old people.  By the time that the generation that's paying for Medicare and Social Security now ages up to those programs, the best estimate is that there won't be anything left for them.  As Thatcher knew, government always is a remarkably poor money manager.

Another example of homegrown socialism's failures is minimum wage laws. These laws mean that the government, rather than the marketplace, sets wages. Even the New York Times once understood that the minimum wage is a way to keep unskilled labor out of the job market entirely.  Rather than paying every worker a living wage, minimum wage laws mean that businesses have to cut back on workers or end up shutting down entirely.

Just recently, a Progressive woman in Seattle wrote that, because of the city’s minimum wage laws, she had lost her job:

This city’s minimum wage is rising to $16.39 an hour on Jan. 1. Instead of receiving a bigger paycheck, I’m left without any pay at all due to the policy change. That’s because the restaurant where I’ve worked for six years is closing as a consequence of the city’s harmful minimum-wage experiment. 

I work for Tom Douglas, one of the best-known restaurateurs in Seattle. Mr. Douglas is in many ways responsible for the city’s reputation as a foodie paradise, and he recently celebrated his 30th anniversary in business. He’s a great boss, and his employees tend to stay at the company for a long time. 

But being an established chef and a good employer doesn’t save you from the burden of a sharp minimum-wage increase, up 73% from $9.47 in 2015. For large-scale employers like Mr. Douglas, there’s no separate rate for workers who earn tips. In Washington and a handful of other states, tips aren’t counted as income earned on the job. That means restaurateurs are expected to pay servers like me the full minimum wage in addition to our considerable tip income. 

When rent is too high, labor costs too much, and customers don’t want to pay $40 for a roast-chicken entree, the only way for many operators to ease the pain is to close. 

Things aren't go well in California either. That state put in place another wage control law that was supposed to help people – only to have the opposite happen. People who freelance don’t belong to unions – and California has had a lot of freelancers, most notably driving for Uber and Lyft. Unions therefore put pressure on the California legislature to change things. The unions obviously didn’t crudely phrase this as a demand for more unions workers. Instead, they, and the politicians who support the union plans, assured everyone that they were doing it for altruism, to make sure that workers got paid good wages and had good benefits.

To that end, in 2019 California passed AB5, which, among other things, says that freelance writers cannot submit more than 35 pieces of writing in a year to a single publication. This was supposed to spare these writers, many of whom are women caring for children or sick people, from being exploited. But because government bows to interest groups, it seldom understands the marketplace and individual needs. The law, which goes into effect in 2020, will ruin people financially:

The bill's pending implementation has wreaked havoc on publications that rely heavily on California freelancers. Just last week, Vox Media announced it will not be renewing the contracts of around 200 journalists who write for the sports website SB Nation. Instead, the company will replace many of those contractors with 20 part-time and full-time employees. Rev, which provides transcription services, and Scripted, which connects freelance copywriters with people who need their services, also notified their California contractors that they would no longer give them work. 

"Companies can simply blacklist California writers and work with writers in other states, and that's exactly what's happening," Alisha Grauso, an entertainment journalist and the co-leader of California Freelance Writers United (CAFWU), tells Reason. "I don't blame them." 

*snip* 

"I've been able to earn nearly three times the amount I did working a day job, doing what I absolutely love, and having more to volunteer and spend time with loved ones," wrote Jackie Lam, a financial journalist. Kelly Butler, a freelance copywriter, echoed those sentiments. "Thousands of CA female freelancer writers, single moms, minorities, stand to lose their livelihood due to this bill," she said. "I was told by a client because I live in CA they can't use me. I made $20K from them this year." 

The Bill’s sponsor, secure in her theory and uninterested in the reality of people’s lives, has no sympathy for those who suffer because of the new law:

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), the architect of AB5, has heard these stories. "I'm sure some legit freelancers lost substantial income," she tweeted in the wake of Vox's announcement, "and I empathize with that especially this time of year. But Vox is a vulture." 

"These were never good jobs," Gonzalez said earlier this month. "No one has ever suggested that, even freelancers." 

When you’ve got theory on your side, who needs facts, even if those facts are real people?

Gonzalez is the face of the same socialism that Bernie is promising for America: It puts power in the hands of poor managers who too often abuse that power.  A government-managed economy is a lousy system that has failed everywhere it's been tried, whether we're talking about the Soviet Union, China (which is now trying a weird controlled "market" economy), Cuba, North Korea, Europe, or any other failed socialist experiment in Africa and Latin America.

And what about the "Democratic" part in that phrase “Democratic Socialism”?  Doesn't that mean we'll get only as much socialism as people allow, and that America will never have a government continuously hungry for more control over people's lives? Well, here's the sad truth -- that word is meaningless.

"Democratic" means that citizens get to vote for their leadership, but it doesn't say anything about the political system itself.  China styles itself the "People's Democratic Republic of China," but no one looks at it and thinks "Wow, that's a free country because it's got the word 'Democratic' in its name."

North Korea, the most repressive country in the world, has as its official name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea." Again, as in China, people in North Korea don't have a right to vote, meaning that it's a voluntary activity; instead, they are required to vote, or else, and they'd better vote for the people their government has already handpicked as the winners.

During the Soviet Union's heyday, that nation always liked to boast that it was more "democratic" than America because it had a higher voter turnout on election day.  Somehow it never mentioned that a person who failed to vote could end up in prison or that, when voters showed up, they had about the same number of candidate choices as they had food choices as the grocery store . . . which is to say, none.

Here's one other thing you ought to know:  Up until 2016, Bernie had never been shy about being called a just a plain, hard-core socialist.  After all, this is a man who happily honeymooned in the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most repressive countries in the world. It was only in 2015, when he started succeeding in the Democrat primaries that he and his supporters began to try to whitewash that "socialist" label.

Never forget, though, that any type of socialist, no matter how they try to dress up their socialism, ends up on the Left side of that line I showed you above – the authoritarian side, the side on which the government gets to control everything and the individual citizens find that they have fewer and fewer rights and experience greater and greater fears about their own government.

But what about the other side of that line . . . the Right side? Isn't that evil too? No. Just no.

Young people are constantly told that the “right” is bad, but that’s just something communists made up. After World War II, when the Nazis were the most evil thing on earth, Communists in Western countries went around teaching that, because they’re good and they’re Left, any ideology that stands against them, whether its Nazism (itself a form of socialism) or a true liberal democracy, must therefore be bad and therefore “Right.”

Here’s the truth: On the right side of that political line in the chart at the top of this post, as long as you don't stray too far into anarchy, you're safe from authoritarianism. That is, you're safe from a system in which a government, or a government working with powerful private interests, controls you. Instead, you have small government and individual liberty.

In a government on the right side of the spectrum, people get to decide what they want to do with their lives.  They get to try to invent, build, serve, work, play, and anything else they please as long as they don't harm others.  They get to buy and sell what they like when they want to.  Because they are allowed to own their own homes and cars and businesses, they have a stake in the success of each of those endeavors, and they work hard to achieve that success.

A free marketplace isn't controlled by a government that calls all the shots.  It's controlled by every person, with all these people organically combining their skills, knowledge, desires, energy, and ambition to create the most prosperous economic engine in the world.  And if you think that's a bad thing, think again.  Thanks to market-driven First World capitalist energy, people live longer, healthier lives than ever before.  Even poor people in America are rich and successful compared to poor people anywhere else in the world.

Here's a good summation of America's virtues, for rich and poor alike, back from the 1960s, when the hippies thought they knew it all:



Oh!  One other thing:  For those concerned about wealth inequality, totalitarian societies have no social mobility and extraordinary wealth inequality.  Whether the society is a monarchy, aristocracy, military junta, or a socialist "paradise," people are either in the ruling party/class or they're not.  Those with power and wealth hold on to it tightly and scatter just enough food, money, and medical care to the masses to prevent a bloody uprising.

In a market economy, though, not only does a rising tide lift all boats, wealth constantly moves around.  Yesterday's immigrant may be today's innovator.  And that rich grandfather might have seen his son waste all the money and his grandchildren become quite poor.


If you figure out how to use the internet well, you may get rich.  On the other hand, if you decide to spend your time smoking pot and playing computer games, you'll probably be poor (and burn through whatever money Mom and Dad left you in their wills).

People who make smart choices can rise up; those who don't . . . well, life can be hard.  But I'd rather live in a world that offers the possibility of success as opposed to a world that keeps everyone firmly down in the mud.

I don't like Bernie because he is a socialist and that's a bad thing in all places, at all times.

(This is an updated version of a blog post I first created in February 2016.)