Is There a Libertarian Case for Bernie Sanders? | Hacker News Reader

Is There a Libertarian Case for Bernie Sanders?

niskanencenter.org

12 pointssaeranv5 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

...is wrong about as often as it is right.

I've been tempted to propose a law to the effect that people who cite Betteridge's law almost never actually check first to see if the article they are responding to is actually one of the cases where it is right.

That appears to be the case here, since the article concludes that there is, and they state this in the first paragraph.

In this case, you can't argue that it's not right.

>The libertarian case for Bernie Sanders is simply that Bernie Sanders wants to make America more like Denmark, Canada, or Sweden … and the citizens of those countries enjoy more liberty than Americans do.

So, those countries are more libertarian than the United States, despite imposing top-heavy government on its people with the goal of taking a sizeable percentage of their income. Right...

In any case, the author himself then seems to conclusively answer No, without explicitly saying "no":

>The lesson Bernie Sanders needs to learn is that you cannot finance a Danish-style welfare state without free markets and large tax increases on the middle class. If you want Danish levels of social spending, you need Danish middle-class tax rates and a relatively unfettered capitalist economy. The fact that he’s unwilling to come out in favor of either half of the Danish formula for a viable social-democratic welfare state is the best evidence that Bernie Sanders is not actually very interested in what it takes to make social democracy work. The great irony of post-1989 political economy is that capitalism has proven itself the most reliable means to socialist ends. Bernie seems not to have gotten the memo.

If you buy the author's argument that Denmark's brand of democratic socialism is the closest to the libertarian ideal we have in the world, then the logical conclusion is that Bernie doesn't understand what makes Denmark's brand of democratic socialism work, so there is no libertarian case for Bernie Sanders.

You are conflating the rightness or not of the article itself with the rightness or not of Betteridge's law applied to the article. As Betteridge himself explains [1]:

    This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that
    any headline which ends in a question mark can be
    answered by the word "no." The reason why
    journalists use that style of headline is that they
    know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t
    actually have the sources and facts to back it up,
    but still want to run it.

When you have an article like this one which uses the question style of headline and then answers the question "yes" it is not a Betteridge headline even if others might argue that the answer should have been "no". Even if the article answers "no", it still isn't necessarily a Betteridge headline if there was actually some reasonable question over whether the answer was "yes" or "no".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Do you disagree with the measurement of liberty, done by the libertarian Fraser Institute (by Wilkinson's former Cato colleagues)? Because if you accept it, then yes, in fact there is more liberty Denmark, Canada or Sweden, because of heavier taxation on the middle class (relative to the US).

Have you ever been poor? Then perhaps you will understand how not having access to affordable health care, or good public transit viciously limits your liberty.

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