Bernie Sanders: Electability and Policy

Many say that they like Bernie Sanders' policies, but they are not voting for him in primaries because they think he is not electable.

I think he is not electable - and I also think he would be a bad president both because of his policies and because of his rigid, dogmatic character.

Sanders is the only major Democratic candidate during this primary season who has said he is against putting a price on carbon emissions. Instead, he proposes spending trillions of federal dollars on a a top-down remake of much of our economy.

A price on carbon emissions is the lowest-cost method of controlling global warming. Some of Sanders' proposals seem very expensive and wasteful. For example, he wants to spend over $500 billion creating a national smart grid. Twenty years ago, a smart grid seemed like a good idea, despite the cost, because it was the best way to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind power: the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere, and if solar or wind power are not available in one place, a smart grid would bring them there from somewhere else.  But today, the cost of battery storage is so low and declining so rapidly, that it seems that local generation with battery storage is more cost effective than shuttling electricity back and forth across the country.

Just as important, if we passed legislation putting a price on emissions, with the price increased steadily over the years, the policy would last long enough to control global warming, since it is difficult to pass new legislation that would change it. But budget allocations are made each year, and if there were one Republican president before we reach net-zero emissions, he would derail Sanders' plan.

Sanders really does think like a socialist. He believes in top-down command-and-control economics rather than in the market.

In the 1960s, when Sanders came of age, many believed that socialism could out-perform capitalism. But the world became disillusioned with socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as it became clear that it led to economic stagnation: socialism collapsed in Russia and eastern Europe; China kept talking about socialism but added a large private sector that is responsible for its economy's dynamism; India and other countries with moderate forms of socialism privatized their state-owned industries. It takes extraordinary ideological rigidity to live through this and still believe in top-down socialist economics, like Sanders.

This rigidity would prevent Sandeers from being effective as a president, since he is incapable of the compromises that are needed to get anything done. Elizabeth Warren campaigned for Medicare for All but also said that in the first couple of years, she would focus on smaller policy changes to extend health insurance to more people, since Medicare for All is not feasible immediately. Bernie Sanders has not said anything like this, and he seems to be incapable of thinking like this. As a result, he would fritter away all of his political capital as president demanding Medicare for All, which Congress will not pass, rather than working on smaller measures that Congress would pass.

Sanders and his young supporters remind me of a saying from the old days when socialist still seemed economically viable: If you are not a socialist at age twenty, you do not have a heart, but if you are still a socialist at age forty, you do not have any common sense.

But that saying applies much more strongly to Sanders. He lived through the world-wide collapse of socialism without learning anything from it, which requires an almost unbelievable absence of common sense.