Bernie Sanders's Applied Economics: Beyond Stage One Thinking

“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” Thomas Sowell, a man of incredible intellect, tackles real world economic problems with simplicity and common sense storytelling in his book Applied Economics: Beyond Stage One Thinking. Sowell, a Chicago trained economist, now the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, orchestrates tangible political and economic incentives, leading with his free market values against government interventionism with its restrictions into sound and predictable results. Focusing

Sanders stated, “A campaign has got to be much more than just getting votes and getting elected,” he told an interviewer soon after launching his run. “It has to be helping to educate people, organize people. If we can do that, we can change the dynamic of politics for years and years to come.” However, Sanders instigates his constituency’s desired choices through government interventionism, with restrictions on the choice right to private property. Sanders subscribes to the mythical ideal that human rights are superior to property rights. Unless enslaved, everyone has the right to the product of his effort, for without the right to material property, humans become nothing more than cattle. Therefore, when Bernie cries, “Health Care is a Human Right”, he leaves out the humans that must perform the product, which he endeavors to give for “free”. As Senator and Doctor Rand Paul at a congressional hearing proposed, "With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies... I am a physician, which means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me; it means you believe in slavery. It means you are going to enslave not only me, but also the janitor at my hospital, the assistants, the nurses... There is an implied threat of force, do you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away, and force me to take care of you? That's ultimately what the right to free healthcare would be." The straight line-through narrative, Sowell developed throughout Applied Economics, focused around the freedom of individuals exchanging physical property for financial assets. While the restrictions on private property, results in the direct cause of systemic