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The Bigger The Government, The Greater The Corruption. Bernie Sanders Is Looking To Double It.

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Front-runner Bernie Sanders portrays himself as the antidote to corruption in Washington. But his own policies guarantee it will vastly increase.

“We will transform our political system by rejecting the influence of big corporate money,” Sanders said when he released his sweeping anti-corruption plan last fall. It includes such things as bans on lobbying, mandatory taxpayer financing of elections and a constitutional amendment restricting free speech.

But at the same time, Sanders’ spending spree would more than double the size of the federal government. He’s proposed free health care, free college, free daycare, guaranteed jobs, a “green new deal.”

When we added up the proposals he’d made, it came to almost $6 trillion in new spending each year. That was as of last August. Sanders has added to his spending plans since then.

Sanders would more than double the size of the federal government when it comes to spending. On Monday, he released some details on where he’d get the money, which include gargantuan tax hikes on everyone, including the middle class. There’s no telling what he’d do to expand the federal government’s regulatory state, but his ambitions there seem limitless.

The result would be to strip Americans of many of the freedoms we currently enjoy in the name of “fairness,” while turning millions into wards of the state.

His policies would also explode the amount of corruption in this country, no matter how many new rules he tries to impose on lobbyists or how many free speech rights he takes away from campaign contributors.

If there’s one thing that should be clear to clean government zealots, it’s that the bigger the government, the greater the corruption.

As we noted in this space recently, there are a number of studies making this connection. One found that the size of government “does indeed have a strong positive influence on corruption.”

Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson looked at several others and found that “Within the U.S., when controlling for a number of other economic and demographic factors, states with larger public sectors seem to have higher corruption.”

We also pointed out that there is a nearly exact correlation between spending by the federal government and spending by lobbyists. (See the chart below.)

You simply can’t have more spending without generating more lobbying, for the simple reason that the bigger the government, the bigger the return for lobbyists who win government favors.

Conversely, the more economic freedom a country enjoys, the less corruption exists.

Writing in Forbes, Alejandro Chafuen plotted countries in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which measures 180 countries across several measures of economic freedom, from labor laws, tax rates, trade, property rights, national debt, and so on. Chafuen then did the same with Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, which ranks countries based on “perceived levels of public sector corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.”

Chafuen found that the correlation between freedom and corruption is “strong and significant.” The greater the economic freedom, the lower the corruption. Less economic freedom – the kind that Sanders is eager to impose in the U.S. – the greater the corruption.

“Economic freedom is a major deterrent to corruption,” says Chafuen, who has been studying this relationship for decades.

“Based on the study results over the last 25 years, I feel confident concluding that leaders who fight corruption with more regulations rather than with true economic freedom are comparable to those who want to fight fires with gasoline: purposefully ignorant or willful accomplices.”

Sanders should know this connection exists from personal experience. As Peter Schweizer details in his new book – “Profiles in Corruption” – Sanders has been using his position as a “public servant” to funnel money to his family and friends.

“There are various ways taxpayer money, school money, other things that have flowed to the family and have made the Sanders family very, very wealthy,” he told Fox News.

The Heritage index meanwhile, shows a direct correlation between economic freedom and prosperity.

“The ideals of economic freedom are strongly associated with healthier societies, cleaner environments, greater per capita wealth, human development, democracy, and poverty elimination,” the report says.

In other words, everything that Sanders says he wants to achieve would be undermined by his socialist policies. There would be less prosperity, more poverty, a worse environment, less democracy … and far more corruption. Don’t believe so? Take a trip to Venezuela and see for yourself.

— Written by John Merline for Issues and Insights

Why Won’t The Left Acknowledge That Capitalism Has Been The Greatest Anti-Poverty Program Ever Conceived By Mankind?

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In a recent interview, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained that the Democratic Party wasn’t sufficiently leftist because it hasn’t embraced her style of socialism. “There are a lot of true believers that we can ‘capitalism’ our way out of poverty,” she complained.

We doubt there are very many such believers remaining in the Democratic Party, given that 70% of those who identify as Democrats now have a positive view of socialism.

To the extent that there are any free-market capitalists left in the Democratic Party, it’s possible that they are true believers because they’ve seen the data, which make it abundantly clear that capitalism has been the greatest anti-poverty program ever conceived by mankind.

The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C., found that, “for the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty.”

The report – which came out more than a year ago – showed that more than 50% of the world’s population lived in households with enough discretionary income to be considered middle class or rich.

More specifically, it found that there were 3.59 billion people in the middle class in 2017, and 200 million who are rich. At the other end, there are 3.2 billion they classify as “vulnerable” and 630 million who are poor.

Based on current trends, over the next decade, the middle-class population will climb by 1.7 billion while the number who are poor or vulnerable will go down by more than 1 billion.

The authors called it “something of enormous global significance” that “is happening almost without notice.” And they are right.

It’s a tipping point. But not the kind of tipping point that the left would ever want to acknowledge.

Meanwhile, other data from the World Bank show that the number of people living in extreme poverty plunged by 1.2 billion, even as the world’s population increased by 2 billion, from 1990 to 2015.

The reason the AOCs and Bernie Sanders of the world want to ignore these trends is because of what’s driving them: Free market capitalism.

The past several decades have seen an increase in economic freedom around the world. The Soviet Union collapsed, China opened up its vast market, trade barriers fell around the world.

The Heritage Foundation, which has been tracking global economic freedom for years with its annual Index of Economic Freedom, says that the global advance of free market capitalism has contributed to a doubling of the size of the world economy.

The index notes that there’s “a robust relationship between improvements in economic freedom and economic growth.”

What’s more, people living in economies rated “free” or “mostly free” have “incomes that are more than twice the average levels in all other countries and more than six times higher than the incomes in ‘repressed’ economies.”

You need only to look at Venezuela to see what happens when a country goes in the other direction – abandoning capitalism in favor of socialism. The animated chart below shows how Venezuela went from one of the richest countries in South America to the absolute poorest … after it embraced the kind of socialist policies AOC and Sanders want to impose here.

The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C., found that, “for the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty.”

Yet despite all this evidence, capitalism is in disrepute. A global survey found that 56% of the 34,000 people surveyed in 28 countries said that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world.”

In the U.S., Democrats are increasingly infatuated with socialism, and so are the young. One big reason for this disconnect is that these data never see the light of day in high schools, or colleges, or in the news.

It’s time for more leaders – in politics, in business, in academia – to shout about the benefits of capitalism for the poor and the middle class, and warn of the deprivations of AOC and Sanders’ brand of socialism.

By John Merline, Issues and Insights.

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