Bernie Sanders is right: Markets are dumb

[Jefferson23]

May 29, 2015

Jeff Spross is the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.


One of the more striking aspects of free market ideology in American politics is how cornucopian magical thinking has become not just acceptable, but ubiquitous and nearly unquestioned.

Consider the reaction to a seemingly commonsensical observation that presidential contender Bernie Sanders made on Tuesday. "The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn't matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty," Sanders told CNBC. "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."

The smug contempt from outlets as varied as The Washington Post and Reason was swift. Even The Week's own Jim Pethokoukis and Michael Brendan Dougherty got in on the scolding. But no reaction had quite the same quality as that of National Review's Kevin Williamson, who insisted "prices are not arbitrary" before going full Road-to-Serfdom on the Vermont senator:

in full: http://theweek.com/articles/557559/bernie-sanders-right-markets-are-dumb