One thing you can be sure of about socialists: they never learn the lessons of basic economics or of history. And so on Monday, America’s senior socialist scold, 81-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.SSR), seized the opportunity of Labor Day to make a proposal that, if implemented, would throw millions of Americans out of work and send untold numbers into abject poverty. Hey, that’s what socialists do.
Sanders took to the pages of the UK’s socialist flagship, The Guardian, to proclaim that “Never before in American history have so few owned so much and has there been so much income and wealth inequality.” Bernie’s solution to this rampant greed was simple: force the avaricious plutocrats to fork over some of their ill-gotten wealth in the form of more leisure time for Americans, with no loss of income. “It’s time for a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay,” proclaimed Sanders. “It’s time that working families were able to take advantage of the increased productivity that new technologies provide so that they can enjoy more leisure time, family time, educational and cultural opportunities — and less stress.” That’s great in theory. As always with socialism, reality would be quite different.
Sanders’ picture of greedy capitalists exploiting disadvantaged American workers is enormously tendentious. He shows no awareness of the fact that there are huge numbers of American businesses that are not raking in massive profits on the backs of their put-upon employees, but are barely getting by amid an enormous tax bite, forests of regulations, and a post-COVID non-participatory workforce that can still enjoy a comfortable living at the expense of those who have gone back to work.
One of the many basic lessons of economics that eludes Sanders is the fact that when business expenses rise, it is generally the employees who suffer. Bernie’s 32-hour work week won’t penalize the corporate billionaires of Big Tech or other massive conglomerates; it will penalize the workers who get laid off so that cash-strapped small and medium-sized businesses can meet rising costs. If employers have to pay their employees for a 40-hour work week but only get thirty-two hours of work, considerable numbers of people are going to find themselves out of jobs.
Other businesses, particularly small businesses, will simply go under, unable to cope with the increased expenses. Thus the cumulative effect of Sanders’ recommendation, if implemented, will be to concentrate wealth further in the hands of those large, greedy corporations that he so despises. They’ll be able to absorb the new expense and pass it on deftly to the consumers, resulting in large-scale price hikes, and they won’t be in any danger of economic ruin. Only those who are much closer to the edge will face that ruin.
Sanders concludes ringingly, “Needless to say, changes that benefit the working class of our country are not going to be easily handed over by the corporate elite. They have to be fought for – and won.” Fought for, like with Molotov cocktails and rocks? Apparently so, for the doddering totalitarian goes on to hail what he describes as the “increased militancy all across our economy – with truck drivers, auto workers, writers, actors, warehouse workers, healthcare professionals, graduate student teachers and baristas.” Yet the only beneficiary of the rioting in the streets that Sanders appears to envision and applaud here would be that same corporate elite, and not the working class at all. The skyrocketing prices and increased unemployment that would result from Sanders’ plan would destabilize American society even more than it is already, thus providing justification for an authoritarian crackdown that would destroy what is left of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
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That’s how socialist societies have always, without exception, ended up: impoverished and unfree, dominated by an all-powerful government that enforces “equity” with the threat of the gulag. Is that what this senator who honeymooned in the old Soviet Union envisions for the United States? It certainly seems so, and his new 32-hour workweek proposal is classic socialism: a pretty package disguising an extremely ugly reality.
“Having never worked a 40-hour week in his 80 years on the planet,” as my PJ colleague Jeff Reynolds put it, Sanders now claims to know how the American economy should run. Like all good socialists, all he really knows how to do is run an economy, and a free society, into the ditch.
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