‘Feel the Bern?’ A Collection of Articles about Bernie Sanders

(Image courtesy of National Review.)

Well, do you? Feel the “Bern” that is? These articles are posted by date, with the newest on top. I’ll add as I come across more so ignore the original date of posting.

Bernie Sanders’ Zinn Zombies
Yes, Zinn would support Sanders, and lots of young people love them both.

Sanders Supported Marxist Totalitarians in Nicaragua
How the self-identified socialist tried to undermine Reagan’s foreign policy in the 1980s.

Bernie Sanders’s ‘Democratic Socialism’ Is The Same Kind That Destroyed Venezuela
Sanders’s policies aren’t a better version of socialism; they are the same as those of socialism past and present. Remember Venezuela when you head to the polls this November.

What Bernie Fans Should Know About the Ideology of Socialism
Bernie Sanders has done it again. In an age when old, rich, white men are heavily maligned by the Left, it’s rather remarkable that Sanders has risen to such prominence in not one, but two presidential contests.

Sanders’ Marxist Campaign
The reality of who they really are.

Sanders’s Socialist Snake Oil
Bernie’s big speech glossed over the bloody history of socialism in favor of “free stuff.”

How Socialist Is Bernie Sanders?
The candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination raises the real prospect of an avowed socialist as President of the United States. Notably, Sanders reveals little about what socialism means to him, other than giving many things away free. He disarms critics by asserting that he is not a “socialist” but a “Democratic Socialist,” without defining what that means.

Beware Bernie Sanders’s Unsound Economic Arguments
The slicing and mincing of complex data structures down to a soundbite is the stock-in-trade of the class warfare industry. A ranting demagogue from Vermont is currently its loudest solicitor.

Editor’s note: Here’s a little humor…
Bernie Sanders Asks Nation To Please Stop Mailing Him Books On Economics
In a late-night show interview Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders politely asked the nation to please stop mailing him books on basic economics, revealing that he’s been “absolutely flooded” with works on the most rudimentary concepts of supply and demand. Sanders made the request after receiving yet another daily shipment of books from well-meaning Americans who simply assumed that he has never read a book on the subject in his life.

How Socialism Ruined My Country — a video from Prager University
Is Bernie Sanders right? Are people living under socialism better off? Brazil is a good case study. Felipe Moura Brasil, a journalist and Veja magazine columnist, explains how his country has fared under socialism.

Bernie Is Blind to Compassion without Compulsion by Christopher Machold
Whether American government and American individuals are compassionate are two distinct questions.

Dumb American Youth by Walter Williams
Explaining the rise of Bernie Sanders.

Where Bernie Went Wrong by Hunter Lewis
And Why His Remedies Will Just Make Crony Capitalism Worse
When Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president on April 30, 2015, few people took much notice. Here was a 73-year-old US Senator from the tiny state of Vermont taking on Hillary Clinton, who seemed to have the nomination locked up.

Bernie is Wrong — A free ebook by New York Times bestselling author Tom Woods
Woods dismantles the Sanders program: Bernie’s views on trade, inequality, and the minimum wage, refuted. Why we certainly don’t want to emulate Sweden. Why “capitalism” isn’t the problem with American health care. And much more.

Bernie’s Free College Isn’t Free — A video by Bill Whittle
Dear Millennials: College, like Health Care, isn’t free — it costs money. So who pays for it? YOU DO. Find out how in Bill Whittle’s latest Firewall.

The danger of Bernie Sanders by Silvio Canto, Jr
To be fair, Bernie Sanders went to the USSR as part of an official trip as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He really did not go there for a honeymoon, as some of us have joked on social media. Nevertheless, he did set up close city-to-city ties with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and was very fond of their brand of socialism. In other words, Bernie Sanders has always been fond of socialists, especially the ones who hate the U.S.

Anti-Capitalism, Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party by E. Jeffrey Ludwig
In recent years, the left-wing communist and socialist hard core of the Democratic Party began calling themselves “Progressives,” as part of the grand scheme of cultural Marxist dissembling whereby they lay claim to the all-American idealism of Theodore Roosevelt. The idea is to appear fair-minded and to pretend that one does not identify with the International Workers of the World or the extreme goals of Eugene Debs and other traitors.

How Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Funds Massive Income Inequality by Michael Bargo, Jr.
The next time Bernie Sanders does a sit-down interview with a major news anchor, he should be asked one simple question: why don’t you ever mention the huge one-percenter salaries and pensions given to government bureaucrats who administer socialist programs?

Socialism for the Uninformed by Thomas Sowell
The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today’s dumbed-down education that so many young Bernie Sanders supporters seem to think that the cost of their college education should — and will — be paid by raising taxes on “the rich.” Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

Vermont College “Feels the Bern” and Closes by Cliff Kincaid
The wife of the socialist candidate promising free college is being blamed for closing down a college in Vermont. Burlington College is going out of business, thanks to debt incurred under the leadership of its former president Jane Sanders, also known as “educator” Dr. Jane Sanders.

The Marie Antoinette Socialism of Bernie Sanders’s Wife by Robert Tracinski
Burlington College is a microcosm of Bernie Sanders’s socialism, including the way Jane Sanders cashed in while running it into the ground.

5 Ideas at the Heart of Socialism by Lawrence W. Reed
The good news is that more millennials are skeptical of economic intervention than trust the government to improve anything. The bad news is that a growing minority of young voters embrace the term socialism, which has an increasingly positive connotation even with those who don’t identify as socialist.

Socialist Self-Deception: Einstein and the USSR to Bernie Sanders and Venezuela by Marian L. Tupy
Albert Einstein is supposed to have defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Yet, as the economic implosion of Venezuela reminds us, we seem to be unable to stop repeating the same terrible mistake: trying to make socialism work.

Bernie-Care Would Cost $32 Trillion, Twice What Sanders Claimed by Charles Hughes
“A Future to Believe In,” or Not.

For God’s Sake, Bernie by Matthew Hennessey
The Democratic candidate has disqualified himself with his call to release an unrepentant terrorist.

The Motto of Sanders Voters: “Socialism is Fun So Long as Someone Else is Paying for It by Daniel Mitchell
My favorite Margaret Thatcher moment might be when she pointed out there’s no such thing as public money, only taxpayer money. Or perhaps when she exposed leftists for being so fixated on class warfare that they would be willing to hurt the poor if they could hurt the rich even more.

Myths, Lies and Capitalism — A video from Prager University
Does free enterprise hurt the poor? Is it unfair and driven by greed? Did it cause the Great Recession? In five minutes, Arthur Brooks answers these questions and more about capitalism.

Poll: Most Dems Admit Free College and Healthcare are Socialist by Ashley Rae Goldenberg
A new Economist/YouGov poll conducted from April 22-26 asked 2,000 Americans whether they believe certain major government policies constitute socialism. The poll found 55 percent of Democrats, including 60 percent of likely Democratic voters, believe free college tuition is socialist.

Sanders’ democratic socialism is still socialism by Svetozar Pejovich
Democratic socialism is Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential election platform. The problem is that no one seems to know what exactly that term means. Democratic socialism is certainly not defined by the policies Sanders has been proposing in his speeches. Instead, the institutional changes required to support Sanders’ policies and the philosophical premises that underpin them define democratic socialism.

Does Democracy Lead to Socialism? Is “Democratic Socialism” an Oxymoron—or Redundant? By B.K. Marcus
“Democratic socialists,” according to the Democratic Socialists of America, “do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. But we do not want big corporate bureaucracies to control our society either.” If that’s true, then democratic socialists should aim to reduce both the size of government and the scope of democratic decisions. Unfortunately, they’re headed in the opposite direction—and trying to drag the rest of us with them.

Bernie Sanders Has No Idea, But Socialism Is Way Worse Than A Soda Tax by Amanda Parry
He fails to recognize — or simply isn’t admitting to voters — that the system he desires doesn’t actually exist. In Europe, it’s not just the wealthy who pay more in taxes. The working and middle classes foot a larger share of the bill as well.

People are lifted out of poverty when the power of government was reduced by Daniel Mitchel
Free markets are just one ingredient in the recipe for prosperity. We also should have small government.

Three Simple Reasons Why Hillary and Bernie’s Real Plan is to Soak the Middle Class by Kent Kellar
All of us are making a mistake if we think that the policy proposals from Bernie and Hillary won’t mean higher taxes on ordinary Americans.

Millennials’ “Bern-ing” Fear Of Taxes by Jamie Barker
If we truly do hate taxes as much as we say and also truly want to help people… According to a recent poll, millennials are more fearful of tax season than any other age demographic in the United States.

Even Paul Krugman Thinks Sanders Is ‘Over The Edge’ by Matt Vespa
From the liberal Washington Post: “Mr. Sanders’s story continues with fantastical claims about how he would make the European social model work in the United States.”

Bernie Sanders’s Plan to Punish the Working Class by Robert Bryce
On Monday, during a campaign event in New York, Senator Bernie Sanders declared his intent to impose a nationwide ban on hydraulic fracturing. By doing so, Sanders has made clear his intent to ruin the U.S. economy, put people out of work, and make Americans totally reliant on imported oil. Indeed, Sanders, the avowed liberal, has just proposed one of the most illiberal policies imaginable.

Bernie Sanders’ Socialism Makes Him Greedy King John, Not Robin Hood by Justin Haskins
Socialism never redistributes fairly because the people who run it always live off everyone else’s hard work, just like Robin Hood’s foe, King John.

A Horrifying Socialist Future for America by Daniel Mitchell
The debate over socialism shouldn’t even exist. Everywhere big government has been tried, it has failed. And we have reams of evidence that free-market economies dramatically out-perform statist economies. Yet the siren song of socialism still appeals to a subsection of the population, either because of naiveté or an unseemly lust to exercise power over others.

Sarah Silverman Explains Why Socialism Is Right For You by Mitch Hall
Comedienne Sarah Silverman has switched support from Hillary Clinton to socialist Bernie Sanders, because ‘free stuff for everyone.’

Bogie Gives Bernie a Lesson in Economics by Don Feder
What a young Ingrid Bergman was to feminine beauty Bernie Sanders is to muddled thinking.

Expanding the ‘Free Stuff Army’ by Robert Knight
Why “democratic socialism” does not work: Ever wonder how Bernie Sanders‘ brand of “democratic socialism” differs from socialism in general, which has wreaked havoc all over the world? The short answer is: only by degree. Progressives of all stripes work to establish “equality” by empowering governments. The difference is their place on the axis of forced egalitarianism.

Millennials for Bernie Sanders, Be Careful What You Wish For by Stella Morabito
Socialism demands that we place blind trust in whoever takes the power to distribute society’s goods and services. History shows those who have this power abuse it in horrific ways.

Bernie’s Doomed Democratic Socialism by Robert Weissberg
Thanks to Bernie Sanders, “Democratic Socialism,” by which he means a cornucopia of state-supplied benefits paid for by squeezing billionaires, is now all the rage.

Sanders’s Confiscatory Capital-Gains Tax by Ramesh Ponnuru
The Tax Policy Center–which is not a conservative outfit–notes that Senator Sanders’s proposal that the top tax rate on capital gains be 64.2 percent “would be well beyond current estimates of the rate that maximizes revenues, and without other changes it might even lead to lost revenues as taxpayers aggressively try to avoid the tax.”

Wealth and Income Inequality Is Not as Bad as You Think by Raymond L. Richman
Sen. Bernie Sanders says, “There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.” He writes: “The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.” The trouble is that none of it is true except the fact that it is a political issue because leftists like Sanders make it so.

Sanders, Clinton, and Their Job-Killing Agendas by Michael Tanner
Liberals’ policies harm the workers they claim to love.

Bernie Sanders: He’s Not Just a Class Warrior by Michael Curtis
Senator Bernie Sanders apparently thinks he has an unparalleled mastery of foreign affairs, and that he has never met a political dictator he didn’t like. Truth will out.

Countering Sanders’s College Scheme by Bruce Walker
Conservatives ought to be making the case that the old-fashioned, traditional college education is hopelessly out of date and wildly expensive.

When You Feel the Bern, ‘Together’ Is How You Conduct Class Warfare by David French
To the socialist, “together” is how one conducts class warfare. It’s us versus them — as a popular ad so clearly states. This message only feels unifying because he’s deliberately shunning the race/gender/sexuality identity politics that have been choking our culture for the past decade-plus. This is old-school “workers of the world unite” rhetoric but with a series of smiling, multicultural faces.

All Aboard Starship Bernie! by Don Feder
Sanders spent the past 35 years in government, 26 of them in Washington. He never ran a business, met a payroll, or created a job for anyone.

Fellow Millennials: Don’t Be Deceived by Democratic Socialism by Celinia Durgin
Bernie Sanders has prompted a new trend: Millennial-splaining of the term “democratic socialism.” “Bernie isn’t a socialist, he’s a democratic socialist!” Millennials explain, with an eye roll. “It’s about the people retaking control from greedy corporations and working together as equals. It’s about ‘togetherness.’” That’s basically how a baby-faced twentysomething with a lot of product in his hair describes it on the “Democratic Socialist” Facebook page.

Weekend at Bernie’s by Benjamin Zycher
As in the movie classic Weekend at Bernie’s, in which a corpse refuses to play the part, socialism — an ideological corpse thoroughly rotted but emitting a ghastly stench describable only by those who have lived through it — shines bright in the minds of innumerable college students, wealthy leftists, and the ineffable Bernie Sanders, “democratic socialist” (an oxymoron), presidential candidate promoting a “new kind of politics,” blatant demagogue, and exposer of Hillary Clinton’s political weaknesses, about all of which more below, including a Communism joke.

The Bernie Tax by Reihan Salam
Sanders’s socialism is very different from the Danish model he admires.

Bernie Sanders’s Free College Tuition Problem by Michael Bargo, Jr.
Bernie Sanders is running for president of the United States proclaiming that under his presidency, all Americans will have the opportunity to attend public college for free. There’s only one fly in the ointment of this free college proposal: today in Illinois, half of the public college and university tuition goes not toward education, but toward pensions for college professors who no longer work.

Face It, Bernie Sanders Is Obama’s Real Successor by David Harsanyi
Call it “democratic socialism” to make yourself feel better, but what we have is an old hippie regurgitating cut-rate Lenin. And it’s obvious — especially when contrasted with the Democrat alternative — this kind of radical idealism is what really propels the Democratic Party.

If Sanders Wins, There Will Be Gold at the End of Every Rainbow and a Unicorn in Every Stable by David French
The Onion would parody these predictions, but it would be too easy.

The Bernie Sanders Tax Hike by Reihan Salam by Reihan Salam
To finance a vast expansion of the federal government, including a new single-payer health system, Bernie Sanders is promising a massive increase in taxes, and not just on the rich.

Is Socialism in America’s Future? by Richard Winchester
In every nation where it’s been tried, socialism has been a colossal failure in terms of the society’s economy. As the late Margaret Thatcher noted, “[t]he problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Why Millennials Can’t Get Enough Of Bernie Sanders by Bre Payton
The millennial love affair with a 74-year-old crank is real. And it just might be Hillary Clinton’s downfall.

The Sanders Repeal-and-Replace Plan by James C. Capretta
‘Medicare for all’ is a terrible idea, but Democratic primary voters love it.

Surprise: Bernie Sanders’s free stuff will be very expensive for you! by Ethel C. Fenig
Avowed socialist, pretend independent, wannabe Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is promising lots of free stuff for Americans – and anyone else in the country, legally or not – if he is elected. Free health care! Free education from pre-pre-school through post-post-college. Free family leave.

Here’s a list of Bernie Sanders’ $19.6 trillion in tax hikes by Philip Klein
Taken together, Sanders is proposing $19.6 trillion in new taxes over a decade, according to an analysis by the Washington Examiner, of which $14 trillion would come from his healthcare plan alone. To put that in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal revenues over the next 10 years will be a total of $41.6 trillion, meaning that Sanders would raise taxes by 47 percent over current levels.

Bernie Sanders: Unfit to Be President by E. Jeffrey Ludwig
During the last Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders described himself as “revolutionary.”

Sanders Adviser: Berniecare Would Increase Total Federal Spending by 55 Percent by Avik Roy
The Bernie Sanders campaign put out a fiscal score for Sanders’ plan to replace the entire U.S. health-care system with a government-run single-payer regime.

How Tocqueville Schooled Bernie Sanders 200 Years Ago by Samuel Gregg
Bernie Sanders appears to think all we need to be happy is more money. Alexis de Tocqueville dismantled that idea two centuries ago.

Bernie Sanders’s Odd Case Against Socialism by Robert Tracinski
So Bernie Sanders finally gave his long-promised speech explaining what “democratic socialism” means and making the case for it. From what I can tell, it means wanting free stuff and hating billionaires.

Bernie Sanders finally admits everyone’s taxes must rise to pay for his spending by Thomas Lifson
Bernie Sanders has been peddling the fantasy that by soaking Wall Street and other mega-rich people with high taxes, a bonanza of freebies – free college, free health care, etc. – can be available for all. 

Bernie Sanders’s Politics by Bruce Walker
Self-identified “Socialists” like Bernie Sanders are a dime a dozen in modern history, which makes Sanders hard to classify more specifically.

No, Bernie Sanders, America Was Not Founded On Racist Principles by Michael Sabo
The principles on which on our country was established are articulated with clarity in the Declaration of Independence. On the matter of race, the Declaration has one simple but profound teaching: “all men are created equal.” That’s it. There are no qualifications or subtractions. Nowhere does the Declaration or the Constitution, for that matter, classify human beings according to the color of their skin.

Bernie Sanders policy proposals would cost $18 trillion by Rick Moran
As a socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders is bubbling over with ideas on how to spend your money – as well as money the government has to print. So what would it cost to turn America into a workers’ paradise?

The Economics of Bernie Sanders by William L. Anderson
The US economy is in serious trouble, but not because of the “greed” of billionaires. It is because the US government, through the Federal Reserve System, has created what David Stockman has called the “casino economy” that has substituted trading of sovereign debt and monetary manipulation for a real economy with interest rates that reflect actual economic fundamentals.

Why Bernie Sanders thinks America is ready for socialism by Rick Moran
Most Americans are totally ignorant of the definition of socialism and Democrats are very good at hiding its true meaning. Instead, Democrats have found a way to make the issue “fairness” rather than “opportunity” – something they used to be known for but have abandoned because it’s easier to build resentment and win elections if you tell the voters life isn’t fair.

Bernie Sanders: Pathetic and Outdated by E. Jeffrey Ludwig
Bernie Sanders, practicing the gutless leadership that he preaches, continues to spout his neo-Marxist rhetoric about the class struggle (oops, “income inequality”).

Bernie Sanders: Proud, Self-Proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” by Leon Puissegur
It seems that, early on, Sanders was deeply in love with the Socialist/Communist ideology and that is not what our Constitution is about. Our Constitution is about freedom of people, while the Socialist/Communist ideology is about enslavement of the people through government programs, much like what is going on in today’s USA.

Bernie Sanders inadvertently makes the case against a $15 minimum wage by Rick Moran
This is why socialists are economic ignoramuses. Even while they promote their income redistribution schemes, they inevitably run afoul of basic economic laws that any freshman in college learns in Econ 101.

Bernie Sanders is a Communist and an Ignoramus by Matthew Vadum
He’s not actually democratic or socialist, either.

The horror of Bernie Sanders by David Lawrence
Sanders and his ilk are limited dolts. He offers us retread, failed socialism. Not too bright. Never worked before. He is selling used goods. He is a horror.

Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism by Kevin D. Williamson
That the relative success of the Western European welfare states, and particularly of the Scandinavian states, is rooted in cultural and ethnic homogeneity is a longstanding conservative criticism of Bernie-style schemes to re-create the Danish model in New Jersey and Texas and Mississippi.

An Economics Lesson For Bernie Sanders by Richard A. Epstein
Progressive policies are unsustainable because they hope to pile on an ever larger set of transfer programs on an economy that is already hobbled by high levels of taxation and extensive government regulation.

Bernie Sanders’ foul socialist odor by Michelle Malkin
Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what’s really ailing America. Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers.

Bernie Sanders’s 12-Point Socialist Plan for America by Pedro Gonzales
Every committed revolutionary needs a plan. Karl Marx had one, and so did Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Top Five Dumbest Quotes From Socialist Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders:
Introduction — #5 — #4 — #3 — #2 — #1

Chart courtesy of the Washington Examiner.

Image credit: ConservativeRepublicanNews.com.