Your underarms are belong to us.
Posted on 11/10/2015 7:38:44 PM PST by Daniel Clark
Smell the Bern: Sanders' odious deodorant remark
by Daniel Clark
In a May interview with the New York Times, Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, "You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country." To a rational person, this is a non sequitur. Taking a product off the market would do nothing to feed the hungry. If Sanders is so concerned about hungry children, he should just tell Michelle Obama to give them their food back.
This critique of his only rings true if you share his belief that we have a "rigged economy" in which most new wealth "goes to the top one percent." In truth, the "one percenters" earn about 15 percent of the income in the U.S., while paying 24 percent of all federal taxes. Yet even if Sanders' figures were anywhere near accurate, the question would be where the wealth "goes" from. He does not consider that the money used to market a product has been earned by the company, or has been successfully raised from investors. No, it must have been "distributed" by some evil entity that rightly should have distributed that same money to the poor.
Don't waste your time explaining to him that the production, distribution and sales of a new product all employ people. No, the deodorant makers simply consume the money that "goes to" them, without anyone else ever seeing a dime.
This is where Republicans go wrong in praising Sanders for his alleged honesty. Finally, they say, we have a Democrat candidate who admits to being a socialist! However much we may disagree with him, at least he means what he says.
No, he doesn't.
Socialists are never honest, because they know their argument can't win if it is presented forthrightly. Just listen to the way that Sanders and other leftists rail against capitalism. Conservatives have no compunction about using the word "capitalism" because we don't hear any negative connotations in it, but Karl Marx invented it as a pejorative term for the free market. Had he called it by its correct name, he'd have been trying to persuade people to reject the free market in favor of authoritarian control. Instead, he presented "capitalism" as if it were just another top-down manmade system being imposed on the people by some external power.
That's just how Bernie Sanders talks about it also. He would have us believe that capitalism and socialism are competing models of centrally controlled economies, except that the capitalist central planners are corrupt and mean, whereas the socialists are benevolent, if pungent.
Bernie's deodorant example presumes the existence of a gigantic reservoir of wealth that has no rightful owner, and a central authority empowered to decide how much "goes to" whom. It can't be that successful business owners earn their money, and reinvest it to produce a wider array of products to the benefit of the consumer. No, their wealth was distributed to them by some sinister capitalist central planner, who might just as easily have distributed it to starving children, except that he wants them to die!
In the real world, the proliferation of consumer choices improves the general population's standard of living. In Bernie's socialist fantasy land, it’s a frivolous waste of money that the central authority could have used more compassionately. This argument would make total sense, if only its ludicrous premise were correct. If wealth came from nowhere, and didn't have to be earned, then distributing it to the needy, instead of to an already successful corporation, would be an easy call to make.
The problem with assigning honesty to this point-of-view is that everyone knows government is not the source of wealth. If it were, then how could wealth be finite? Why not just continue to generate it until everybody is rich?
Those who are officially categorized as impoverished in the United States have a higher standard of living than middle-income earners in those European socialist democracies about which Sanders romanticizes. You know, the ones that presumably have just as many different kinds of deodorant as Bernie feels they "need." If wealth were produced by government, those nations would be the more prosperous ones.
If Bernie Sanders were really honest, he'd admit that he dislikes the free market because he doesn't trust people to be free. Instead, he pretends to simply prefer one redistributionist system over another, on the basis that the latter is wrongly administered. The veracity of that argument doesn’t even pass the smell test.
-- Daniel Clark is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of a web publication called The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press, where he also publishes a seasonal sports digest as The College Football Czar.
Yeah well, you know liberals...
Bernies misses the old USSR where everyone waited in line for hours for the same crappy tasting toothpaste. Everyone but the elites like Bernie, that is. They got their choice of Crest, Colgate or any other brand imported from the west.
Just remember; under socialism, you wait for bread. Under capitalism, bread waits for you.
Indeed. I find the “deodorant” remark ominous.
It’s what makes the difference between lines of people waiting for bread vs lines of bread waiting for people. And that’s no joke.
(Said a someone who weekly takes bushels of leftover bread to the poor, knowing there would be no extra to give under Bernie’s system.)
It isn't that he doesn't trust people. It's that he wants to control every aspect of their lives.
Capitalism is the simple idea that people who contribute to society should be rewarded in a manner proportional to their contribution.
Your underarms are belong to us.
Old, senile and stupid is no way to go thru life, Bern
Sanders remarks about deodarant smacks of the old Five Year Economic Plans in the former Soviet Union where government apparatchiks attempted to plan the production quotas of everything from toilet paper to light bulbs. Invariably the bureaucrats would not get the numbers right leading to consumers waiting in long lines for items in short supply and ridiculous surpluses being delivered elsewhere. Government run economies do not work because they can never adapt to market changes or their own failures.
Over on Democrat Underground, they refer to a "plate of cookies" or a "cookie jar" when they plot how to steal and control the nations private wealth. They believe the rich simply reached into a jar and "took" most of the cookies. When you try to explain to them that cookies do not come from plates, or cookie jars, they just glaze over. It's a waste of time trying to win them over so the important thing is to defeat them at the polls.
But the shoe collecting deodorant addicted low info sheltered KADARSHIAN generation will still vote for him.
Democrat legislators have been for years talking about the pie when refering to national wealth. They think of it as a fixed pie to redistribute instead of realizing that someone made that pie and made it grow
The endgame is a single deodorant brand named something like “Glorious Revolution Deodorant” that only 1 percenter’s can afford. And it won’t work.
Bernie, you said: "You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."
So let me get this straight, Bernie . . . you're going to set up an agency or a czar to determine how many kinds of deodorant, and how much of it, can be permitted by law?
Will you do the same with toilet paper? I mean look how many brands of toilet paper there are. Shall we just set up a monopoly of one company, or better yet, a government monopoly, to produce exactly the right amount of toilet paper, or otherwise limit the amount of toilet paper that gets produced?
Are you going to hire Michael Gruber to be the guy who figures out the correct amount of toilet paper that people should be allowed to use? He's smart. He teaches at MIT. So why shouldn't we put him in charge of figuring out exactly how much of everything should or shouldn't be produced for the American people?
Have you been to socialist Venezuela lately, Bernie? They seem to have solved the problem of too many toilet paper brands. Because right now there is no toilet paper to be had at all in socialist Venezuela.
So tell me Bernie, what exactly will you do to feed starving children by reducing the amount of toilet paper we have in this country? And by the way, when you close all the toilet paper companies, how will the people who used to work at them feed their own starving children?
Bernie? . . . .
Well heck - we probably really don't need all the various sizes of sneakers (or other clothing) either. Just make everything big enough for the biggest person out there and use crumpled up paper, twine, duct tape, etc., to adjust for smaller bodies....
If they’re able to find a market and turn a profit, they’re employing people and generating tax revenue, Bernie.
Everyone needs a kook
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