Crony billionaire Warren Buffett on Tuesday praised the presidential campaign of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, even though Buffett said he still backs Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
"I think we all have lessons to learn from him (Sanders)," Buffett said in an interview with Reuters.
"There are very few candidates that have - not just this election but in past elections - that have campaigned like Bernie Sanders," Buffett continued.
"You know exactly what he feels on everything. He's articulate, and he doesn’t go around knocking the other candidates."
Hmm, I never heard him say those things about Ron Paul.
Buffett said that while he agrees with Sanders about the need to help those left behind by the market economy, "I disagree with him very much on the production side."
So, this would mean he is probably more in line with Dr. Paul on the "production side"? But, never a word from Buffett about Ron Paul, despite the fact that Buffett's father Congressman Howard Buffett was an old school conservative who knew and corresponded with Murray Rothbard, who was a mentor to Dr. Paul.
I always have this feeling that Buffett is holding cards he isn't showing.
-RW
"Buffett said that while he agrees with Sanders about the need to help those left behind by the market economy,"
ReplyDeleteMost people in this country are not Libertarians on this issue including alot of my "conservative" friends and family who think we need to help out those on the lowest rung who have no prospects of a better life (ie severely disabled, mentally handicapped). They do wonder, though, why on earth does it takes 50 of GDP and a 5 trilion dollar budget to do it?
You are correct. The appropriate response is always to point to government waste, the greater efficiency of private charities, and the altruism of your friends and family.
DeleteIf they are conservatives, there's a good chance they're religious. If they're religious, there's a good chance they go to church. If they go to church, there's a good chance they do charity work for the church's less fortunate congregates.
The point of argumentation, which I'm sure you already make, is that if Uncle Sam didn't take so much of your money, just think how much more good work you could do through your church's private charity. The truly less fortunate (ie severely disabled, mentally handicapped, etc) would receive far greater charity than simply being a number on some government dole list with all of the great service a DMV-like bureaucracy can provide.
If they are not religious church goers, the argument can still be made with some private charity as a substitute.
Yeah. My very rough figures would indicate that federal, state and local government spending combined is about 20-24K per person per year. So a family of 4 is receiving about 80-100K of direct or indirect government benefits (military, welfare, healthcare, roads, schools, police, fire, etc.) Am totally off base here? Anybody else run the numbers to see?
DeleteIf you took all the numbers of government spending and divided by population, then you could extrapolate figures similar to these. But, this fall's into Bastiat's ideas about the seen vs. the unseen (along with an inability calculate actual value received ... value is ordinal, not cardinal, so no math can be used ... additionally, this doesn't factor who actually benefits and who is harmed). People see the government spending and presume it to be a benefit. However, the money has to come from somewhere. And, the standard government practice is a combination of stealing from the present (taxation) and a promise to steal in the future (borrowing). The amount spent necessarily deprives the market of spending to meet peoples' actual wants. If the government actually provided things people want, then they could raise revenue through voluntary means, rather than taxation.
DeleteThe great bulk of spending is pure waste. Many "benefits" are actually things there would be no market for, or a much smaller market. The remainder could better be provided by the market than by the inept bureaucratic government. Simply put, there is absolutely no real benefit to the the average family except to those employed by government or those who receive the majority of their income from government welfare (corporate or otherwise).
With all the money being taken from the present and the future, it distorts and hampers the market, driving up costs for everyone (again, except the takers in the bureaucracy), making fewer items available, and harming everyone. We're all less wealthy because of it.
Although the figure cannot be calculated (as is true of actual "benefits", since there is no market value of nuclear submarine protection), what government provides is net harm, rather than net benefits. It's just that this harm is unseen, and can only be determined through a complex chain of logical analysis. No figures could be made, just as no figures can actually be calculated for the supposed benefits to us common folk (though, it's frequently done).
Good luck explaining this to the casual citizen ...
Cool post. I need to order Bastiat's books.
Delete"They do wonder, though, why on earth it takes 50 of GDP and a 5 trilion dollar budget to do it."
ReplyDeleteExplain to them that it's largely due to NOT allowing a free market economy to freely function and the massive bureaucracies involved that take massive amounts of money to run & disperse said budget. In short, much of it, I suspect, is wasted.
IDK about the rest of you, but, most of the folks I know are decent people who would donate charitably and regularly to those in need if there were no central planning and bureaucracies taking their money and they actually had the extra money left in their pockets to donate. I don't believe there would be millions of people falling through the cracks or being "left behind", all other things being equal. It's just propaganda by those who want to control others and pit them against one another. They're evil.
I was surprised by how insane Bernie sanders' policies were when I finally researched him.
ReplyDelete