[Updated: Gun Rights Too!] When Bernie Sanders Called for Ending Compulsory Education & Legalizing All Drugs
The Vermont socialist advanced some libertarian ideas way back in the day.
As Ed Krayewski has noted, insurgent Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) has proposed somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 trillion worth of free stuff if he wins the 2016 election.
If that wasn't enough to make you never vote for him, there's also his cockamamie understanding of economics, which revolve around seeing some sort of zero-sum game between the number of deodorant flavors (scents?) and child poverty.
And he is, by his own definition, a democratic socialist, which mostly means taking some people's money and giving it other people. Which in a way that makes him the most honest candidate running for the White House.
If there was ever a Bernie Sanders worth voting for from a libertarian perspective, it might have been the one described in a Mother Jones article from earlier this year. Back in the early 1970s, when Sanders was running for various offices in Vermont, his basic platform went something like this:
Sanders lost that race, the first of four losing campaigns over the next five years (twice for Senate, twice for governor). In addition to opposing the war, the party pushed for things including a guaranteed minimum wage, tougher corporate regulations, and an end to compulsory education. (Vermont's schools "crush the spirits of our children" Sanders once remarked). Sanders floated hippie-friendly proposals, such as legalizing all drugs and widening the entrance ramps of interstate highways to allow cars to more easily pull over to pick up hitchhikers.
I'm no fan of a conventional minimum wage (though I'm happy to consider a basic guaranteed income if it replaced all other transfer payments made by the state) but being against Vietnam, ending compulsory schooling, and ending the drug war. In such a world, a minimum wage and "tougher" corporate regs (depending on what that means) could well have been a small price to pay for such maximal freedom on three other important issues.
[Update: As Jesse Walker reminds me, in 1972, Sanders was part of a party calling for gun rights and an end to all sorts of morals laws. Check that out here.]
I doubt that tonight's debate moderators will fisk the Sanders' policy agenda circa 1971, which in any case seems buried by now under scads of bad ideas emanating from the senator's policy shop. Whether it is waging war on Chinese-made bobbleheads at American museums or castigating low-wage immigrants as job stealers, Sanders has really piled on the sorts of anti-free-market proposals for which he'll hopefully be called out on tonight.
From 2011, Sanders' War on Chinese Bobbleheads:
