Capitalism Has Its Uses—Bernie Says So
Capitalism Has Its Uses—Bernie Says So
Plus: staring Zoomers and a fresh war.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) want to impose a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires, which seems predictable enough. This tax would bring in $4.4 trillion over the next decade, apparently, which would then be passed along—minus administrative overhead, of course—to people in households making less than $150,000 a year.
Sanders and Khanna, of course, won’t pocket any of the money themselves, but that’s okay. They already make $174,000 a year, hardly a princely sum these days, but more than most Americans take home. Their pay also comes, of course, from taxes—these paid by everyone, not just billionaires.
Bernie, even on his meagre salary as a United States Senator, is feeling no pain. By now, it’s well known that he owns three homes and knows better than to try to hide the fact.
“Do I own three residences? Yeah, I do,” he admits. “I live here in Burlington, Vermont. We live in a middle-class neighborhood. Nice house. Guess what? I’m a United States senator and I own a home in Washington, DC, as do most senators—you live there year after year…. And guess what? Like many thousands of people in the state of Vermont, I have a summer camp. It’s a nice one on Lake Champlain. That’s it.”
Ah, the irony of it all! Sanders did not buy three homes on his salary as a senator. He “wrote two best-selling books,” he reminds us, including It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. (Thanks, Bernie, for your permission.)
Now comes an entire book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place, in which the author Dan Chiasson devotes nearly 600 pages just to the eight years Sanders spent as that city’s mayor. In the New York Times Book Review in early March, Alexander Nazaryan writes that it is “impressive but frustrating.”
Chiasson seems to worship Bernie, which is not always the case with those who know the man. Sanders clearly inspires loyalty in his fans—not least in this book’s author—but he can also be abrasive, irascible, and tactless. As one advisor wrote in a 1982 memo to him, “You are not nice to people.”
Maybe not, but St. Bernard means well, and that’s what socialism is all about, right? Intentions are everything. Results, in the long run, matter less than the stated objectives of the visionaries earnestly paving our highways to Hell.
Bernie for Burlington, at least for those of us not under the Sanders spell, sounds like hard going. It takes Chiasson 257 pages just to get to our hero’s first campaign for mayor, and while he makes Burlington “the place to see socialism in action,” Bernie could also, when the need arose, morph into “a classic ribbon-cutting mayor” and (are you ready?) “an innovative capitalist.”
He’s no Marxist, the publication Democratic Left reassures us. He’s not for the “withering away of the state,” Mark S. Malaszczyk of the Long Island Democratic Socialists of America writes, but for “preserving [it] as a tool for public welfare.” What idealistic people Bernie’s age not so long ago denounced as the national security state, the military-industrial complex, and the Establishment now provide a “social safety net within a mixed-market economy.”
Bernie’s a “socialist,” of course, but his socialism “is a form of social democracy—a philosophy that respects private property while prioritizing human dignity, much like the progressive reforms of the early 20th century.”
This is comforting, especially since Bernie’s impact beyond the Green Mountain State remains considerable. While his fans can point to “few robust legislative accomplishments,” in Nazaryan’s words, he “has cleared the way for younger, more charismatic democratic socialists, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani.”
This is by no means an authorized biography—Bernie and wife Jane did not cooperate—but “it is not clear how much they would have had to add.” They could hardly have made the book more fawning than it already seems to be.
“By collapsing the distance between himself and his subject,” the Times’ reviewer says, Chiasson “turns history into a sales pitch.” That hallmark of capitalism, it turns out, also serves a useful purpose.
We finally saw Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which was almost two-and-a-half years in the making and is two-and-a-half hours long. The cinematography, critics say, is “stunning.” Variety’s review comes closer to my own reaction. With all its operatic overkill, Frankenstein “buckles under its own weight.” I almost always enjoy Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz, but their roles here end all too soon. I also found Mia Goth’s Lady Elizabeth Harlander quite fetching, but the more I have learned about this actress (can we still say actress?), the less I like.
Mia Goth cannot be her real name, I thought, but evidently it is. Mia Gypsy Mello de Silva Goth, it turns out, really is the name she was assigned at birth, as we are now instructed to say. In 2016, she and Shia LaBeouf, who met on the set of Nymphomaniac, got hitched in Las Vegas at a ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator. If a Las Vegas ceremony with an Elvis impersonator officiating doesn’t tell the world they are serious about marriage, I don’t know what would.
What puts me off mainly about this woman is that in almost every picture I see of her—and I’ve looked for them—she is gazing out at the rest of us with what I understand is called the Gen Z Stare. This disdainfully uncomprehending look, which Aubrey Plaza and Billie Eilish also affect, is associated with service workers being asked apparently idiotic questions.
We’ve gone, it seems, from “the customer is always right” to “the customer is always stupid.”
So, we are at war again, and people are rightly disturbed. But a proper response to such occurrences, Albert Jay Nock wrote, is to ask, “What did you expect?” That’s the question that
ought to be put every time a story of State villainy appears in the news. It ought to be thrown at our public day after day, from every newspaper, periodical, lecture platform, and radio station in the land; and it ought to be backed up by a simple appeal to history, a simple invitation to look at the record.
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