Bernie Is Not a Socialist and America Is Not Capitalist | Cato Institute

Bernie Is Not a Socialist and America Is Not Capitalist | Cato Institute: "First, Sanders is not a socialist, but a social democrat. Second, the United States does not have a strictly capitalist economy, but a mixed one. As such, it combines a high level of private ownership of capital and the means of production with relatively onerous regulation and taxation. Third, to the extent that what anti-capitalist Sanders supporters really want is a Scandinavian-style social democracy, with its high level of wealth redistribution and income equality, they should consider that even some of the most socially democratic countries on earth are, in one crucial way, more capitalist than the United States."



"lack of private enterprise resulted in low economic growth and, consequently, low standards of living. Thus, while income equality was relatively high (if party bosses and their cronies were excluded from the calculations), people in Soviet-bloc countries were much poorer than their counterparts in the West. Nobody has yet figured out a way of combining genuine socialism with high rates of growth over a long period of time."


"Capitalism is often confused with “crony” capitalism—an odious nexus of corporate and political power that crushes the worker and cheats the consumer."



"when supporters do refer to “capitalism,” they mean the exact opposite of what people on the left sometimes mean by crony capitalism."



"the government is by far the single most important spender and, consequently, the single most important economic actor"