He thinks socialism is the cure for all kinds of ills he sees as being caused by capitalism. He ignores the greater ills brought about by socialism, including the hundreds of millions killed by socialism in its myriad forms.
But someone who was brought up in a purely socialist country tells Bernie “Don't lecture me about socialism. I lived through it.”
Garry Kasparov writes:
Last week I expressed some of these thoughts on Facebook after hearing a clip of “democratic socialist” candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday. This was already a rarity, considering how little time the networks have left after their blanket coverage of Donald Trump's latest outrages. My post on the nature of socialism was 113 words long, a quick response to critics of a cartoon I had posted of Bernie Sanders wearing a baseball cap reading “Make America Greece Again.”Sanders also believes that impoverishing the rich will somehow enrich the poor even though there are hundreds of years of history that disprove that belief. All it does is make everyone poor. He also appears to believe in the Zero Sum Theory of Wealth, meaning that in order for someone to become rich it was necessary to make someone else poor. But that 'truth' died over two centuries ago after the Industrial Revolution picked up steam (no pun intended). However that won't stop Bernie and the other true believers from trying to sell their zero-sum snake oil.
My goal was to remind people that Americans talking about socialism in the 21st century was a luxury paid for by the successes of capitalism in the 20th. And that while inequality is a huge problem, the best way to increase everyone’s share of pie is to make the pie bigger, not to dismantle the bakery. Much to my surprise, my little rant went viral, as the saying goes. Instead of the usual few hundred Facebook shares, this paragraph quickly reached tens of thousands. By the next morning it had reached several million people, more than any of the day’s political posts by the leading candidates. A week later and it has over 3,000 comments, 57,000 shares, and a 9.3 million reach that is in the category usually reserved for photos of pop stars and kitten videos.
My conclusion that “the idea that the solution [to inequality] is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd” apparently had great resonance, and I think I know why. There is a growing consensus that America has deep troubles, and no one can agree on solutions. Everyone agrees that Washington should change, and some want the government to do much more while others want it to do much less.
Read the rest of Kasparov's words and take his opinion and experience to heart – Socialism isn't the cure, it's the disease.