Who won the duel between Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul?

When Senator Bernie Sanders published his book “Guide to Political Revolution” in 2017, a stranger familiar with my writings gifted me that book and asked me to write a review. I promised to do it sometime and put the book aside.

In 2019, I attended an event where Senator Rand Paul was a speaker. The entry fee included a copy of his book “The Case Against Socialism.” When Rand Paul was signing that book for me, he looked at me with disbelief when I told him I might write a review. I did not tell him I had the idea of writing a review of two books together, his and that of Bernie Sanders.

Then I looked at Senator Paul’s book, wondering what new things he might write about socialism. The best book on the subject is by Ludwig von Mises, “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,” published in 1922. In this classic dissertation, von Mises argued that socialism would never work because, in its concept, it is against human nature. A quick look at the content page told me that Senator Paul listed many instances of people trying socialism after 1922, with the result that von Misses predicted. So, I put that book aside as well.

Bernie Sanders’ recent book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” got my attention because I am angry at capitalism, too — not at capitalism in general but at the version we have in the United States. So, I meticulously read Bernie Sanders’ two books and Rand Paul’s one. The time to write about the duel of two senators has come.

I know something about socialism and capitalism, too

I grew up in Poland, at the time when it was a socialistic country. Learning socialistic principles was a part of our education. The benefits of socialism were our regular indoctrination from the media. However, whatever I observed around me led me to the conclusion that socialism would never work because, in its concept, it was against human nature.

I did not learn that from von Mises; I read his book about 30 years later when I was already living in the United States. Tight censorship in Poland kept us from the ideas of people like von Mises. When I once expressed a critique of socialism during a lecture in high school, my teacher reprimanded my ignorance and recommended that I learn more about the subject.

So, I did. I took some college-grade classes and read intensively. I learned about socialism from its academic-level advocates. Socialism looked great on paper, but what I saw and experienced daily testified otherwise. Trust in public institutions disappeared, and the economy disintegrated. Finally, I needed to sharpen my entrepreneurial skills to support my family during the complete collapse of the Polish economy in the early 1980s.

As a political writer, I tried to find solutions. I wrote a book, “Could it be better in Poland?” Considering Polish realities, I did not even once mention that socialism is evil. I focused on technicalities, pointing out what works and what does not. After reading the manuscript, my uncle, a devoted believer in socialism and a member of the official pro-socialistic propaganda apparatus in Poland, told me that it was the most anti-socialistic book he had ever read. I could not publish it in Poland; I did it in 1988 in Chicago.

A year after arriving in Chicago, I launched a small service company. I had a similar business back in Poland. Soon, I started noticing that multiple regulations imposed by the city, state, and federal agencies impaired my freedom of enterprise. The bureaucratic rules did not seem much different than those I experienced in socialist Poland.

When the Berlin Wall finally fell, I used to joke that America won the Cold War on the front line, but socialism had already sneaked through the kitchen door. So, when the opportunity to sell the business with a decent profit appeared, I did it.

Both senators missed the subject

Rand Paul’s book shines with the author’s erudition. The narration is in the tone of popularizing scientific information. Nevertheless, it stays away from the problems the United States is experiencing now. The author brings rich data showing that socialism always hampers prosperity and human rights. However, there is no connection between those conclusions and the growing popularity of socialism in the United States. Senator Paul seems to hope that by discrediting socialism in general, Senator Sanders and politicians from his camp will lose public support.

Senator Sanders does the same but in reverse. He points out all the shortcomings of the system we have in the United States, calls it “uber capitalism,” and spreads a vision of prosperity by taking from the rich and giving it to the poor.

I have to praise Senator Sanders for describing our reality as it is. He points out the growing disparities between the poor and the rich. He correctly pinpoints the undue influence of big money in media and politics, naming the three most potent firms: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. The title of that chapter is “Billionaires should not exist.” It raises the question: Would we have America as we know it without people like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk?

Both senators tell us what they do not like. Senator Sanders sees our problems as the result of capitalism’s inherent features and firmly believes that the solution is for the government to walk in, tax the rich mercilessly, and provide for the poor. However, he is mum about how he would like to do it. He wrote a book as though critics, like Senator Paul, never existed. His supporters posted many enthusiastic reviews on Amazon. I doubt any of Senator Paul’s supporters switched to Senator Sanders’ camp.

Senator Paul is concerned with the growing support that Bernie Sanders is getting, so he tries to discredit socialism. Like Senator Sanders, he is not curious to investigate why we experience the problems we have. I doubt he lured any of Senator Sanders’ followers to his camp.

Can we have a Scandinavian version of socialism in the United States?

The biggest value of “The Case Against Socialism” is the good data behind the theory about the success of Scandinavian socialism. Before tinkering with socialism, Denmark and Sweden were among the wealthiest capitalistic nations. Then, they did not change the free market system; they only expanded social services. Free education and subsidized health care were the most valuable.

As always, with the expansion of welfare, the taxes went up, and the wasteful spending ballooned. However, with strong local democracy, it was not as exuberant as federal spending in the U.S. Still, it hampered entrepreneurship, and since the 1970s, the generosity in welfare spending has been tempered.

Senator Paul’s arguments on this aspect are convincing, but he did not emphasize the most important one, the small size of the Scandinavian nations.

I found the most convincing reasoning against applying the Scandinavian model to the United States in the lengthy Medium essay “How Norway Got Rich Against All Odds Before Oil.” The author is a Norwegian who knows the U.S. well and considers himself as leaning toward socialism. He explains that with limited natural resources, a cold climate, and a rocky terrain, Norwegians needed to cooperate to survive. He failed to see that the organic forms of collective work were the same as those that led to the rise of capitalism in Western Europe and the United States.

Due to geographic limitations, Norwegians had a sparse population. They never could accumulate the capital that in Great Britain led to the invention of the steam engine, railroads, and booming industrialization, which later spread to the United States and the rest of Europe. However, thanks to their free market culture, Norwegians were always among the first adopters of the newest technologies invented elsewhere and developed by the filthy rich capitalists that Bernie Sanders condemns so much.

Without wild capitalism flourishing elsewhere, those hardworking Norwegians might still be doing fine, but their standard of living might not have changed much from that of their Viking ancestors.

Ergo, in this regard, neither of the two senators prevails. Senator Sanders does not understand that progress cannot be made without abundant capital accumulation. Referring to his phrase, we need billionaires because there is no progress without them.

Senator Paul did not score here for the same reason; he did not explain that there would be no prosperity in Scandinavia without wild capitalism like the one we still have in America.

Is Senator Paul a socialist?

Senator Paul wrote with disgust that, at some point, socialists supported eugenics. He did not elaborate that it was at the beginning of the 20^th century when newly enriched Americans wanted the government to improve society. Eugenics came in handy, claiming that some people are inherently of worse stock than others.

Alcoholism was a social problem. Eugenics convinced some Americans that alcoholics are incurable and the government needs to ban the production and sale of adult beverages. The same eugenics persuaded adherents that most immigrants are of worse stock than Americans would want, so immigration should be curtailed.

As a result, in 1917-21, Prohibition and restrictive immigration policies were voted in. Both acts gave the government excessive powers to limit Americans’ liberties in the name of the lofty socialist ideas of using police powers to improve society.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but the purely socialistic immigration policy, with some revisions, still stands. That policy turned a routine depression of 1929 into the Great Depression. All later amendments gave Americans the most idiotic immigration policy worldwide.

In his 2013 immigration speech, the newly elected Senator Paul indicated that he realized the need for reform. However, he did not see that it was a socialist concept, which — as he proves in his book — has never worked and will never work. He put the poison pill in his call for reform by claiming that before reforming immigration policy, we have to stop illegal immigration by force first. It was as wise as asking to eliminate all unlawful alcohol production and sale before revoking Prohibition.

In his recent speech, Senator Paul talked about the invasion on the Southern border, asking for spending more money to protect it. If he were for liberty, as he claims, he would have known in 2013 that illegal immigration is a rational response to the stupidity of our immigration policy.

By now, he should have learned that even if we spend all the money we have and all the money we can borrow to protect the border, it will not work. We might suffocate the economy, at best. The solution to that disaster is not throwing more money into border protection but using more brains in Congress.

Unfortunately, on immigration, Senator Paul left the train called “Liberty” at the station called “Socialism.”

As old folks used to say, if one of your shoes is dirty, you walk in the dirty shoes. Supporting socialism on one issue makes Senator Paul a socialist.

Does Senator Bernie support billionaires?

Similarly to Senator Sanders, I am angry at the capitalism we have in the United States because even vocal supporters of it, like Senator Paul, are socialists in denial. Before socialists started “improving” capitalism about a century ago, Americans were less angry about their political realities.

People in Poland are not angry at capitalism, which in one generation raised their standard of living from the misery of socialism close to that in wealthy Western Europe. The same country, the same people — socialism destroyed the economy, capitalism brought prosperity. There is nothing wrong with capitalism per se, but Senator Sanders is correct that the version of capitalism practiced now in the United States does not work.

Unaffordable health care is one of the most drastic examples. When the discussion about the proposal of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, started, I asked an elderly person about health care 60 years earlier.

That person’s father was a delivery driver for a small business in Chicago; the mother was taking care of five kids. When one of the kids got sick, the mom took them to a doctor and paid $5 per visit, which would be about $60 today. When one of them broke an arm, they went to the hospital. That person did not recall that paying medical bills was a hassle during his humble upbringing. He agreed that things worsened as soon as the government started improving them.

Senator Sanders praises Medicare as an outstanding achievement. I am on Medicare, so I see how a petty blood test that takes a minute requires 10 minutes of paperwork. Medicare always pays the bills sent by service providers that meet some formal criteria but never asks me to approve the charge.

If a provider screws up a surgery, a corrective one, often more elaborate and more expensive, is needed. Hospitals do not ask insurance to pay for their error; they charge Medicare. So, they have no incentives to provide quality care because they will make more money if they make errors. It is one of many reasons health care makes most of us poorer and billionaires richer.

Then, with the noble intention of making Medicare more affordable, politicians invented Medicare Advantage. After reviewing the details of that offer, I did not sign up for it, seeing it as a scam. I used data from The New York Times to support my conclusions in my article. At the time of this writing, the Wall Street Journal confirmed my findings.

Many tycoons multiplied their billions by providing administrative services for Medicare. It is commonly agreed that it would be even more wasteful if the government administration did that. But Senator Sanders pretends that waste does not exist. He sees the solution in expanding Medicare for everyone. As I wrote in one of my articles, it might take ending America as we know it to make it happen.

“Billionaires do not pay for it when we get something free from the government; they get richer.” It is a quote from my earlier article, “A trillion dollars here, another trillion there,” which I strongly recommended Senator Sanders to read. The more the government does, the more billionaires make. The more they have, the more they spend on corrupting politicians to make even more. Senator Sanders does not see that his efforts make billionaires richer and most of us poorer.

And the winner is …

Both senators made considerable efforts to propagate their political agendas and avoided prosaic analyses of the causes of our problems. Why? One probable answer is that they are more likely to get elected by pleasing their section of misinformed Americans.

Both senators support their arguments with examples from many foreign countries. They miss the one that matters the most, Argentina. By the end of the 19^th century, it was one of the wealthiest nations. Then, similarly to the United States, it started implementing socialistic concepts. With weaker free market traditions and the constitution not as firm as the American one, it advanced on that path much faster than the United States. The Argentinian economy endured for decades, but finally, it collapsed. Senator Sanders does not tell us how he would avoid the same outcome in the United States.

Senator Paul fails to see that the United States is slowly but surely going downhill, following the Argentine pattern. He criticizes Senator Sanders, but he projects no vision for an alternative. And the most frustrating thing is he does not see the urgency.

Both senators claim that they care about the nation. However, their reasoning makes their ideological preferences seem more important than the nation. If they cared about the country, they would conduct their polemics in front of the audience.

Convincing Senator Sanders that socialism does not work would likely be as easy as convincing a devoted 82-year-old priest that God does not exist. However, the listeners might make their own judgments. It would be interesting to hear from Senator Paul why he supports socialism in the case of immigration and why he does not stand for capitalism but considers himself a conservative, which is enigmatic, if not meaningless.

Americans see signs of trouble and seek answers about which way is best to restore prosperity. As the Polish saying goes, Senator Sanders promises pears on a willow tree. Senator Paul warns us that it is a wrong path but shows us no better one. Who wins in this duel?

The winner is, dead since 1973, Ludwig von Misses. In 1956, he wrote a booklet “The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.” It is the classic and still the best explanation of why, more than before, Americans reject capitalism and turn toward socialism. I suspect both senators found it convenient to pretend they did not know about that dissertation.