Friday, March 25, 2016

The Zero-Sum Worlds of Trump and Sanders

Both presidential candidates support long-discredited economic policies.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders might seem unlikely economic soul mates, but they share a mistaken reliance on zero-sum thinking and long-discredited economic policies.
Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-trade positions make him essentially a disciple of mercantilism—a protectionist economic theory refuted by Adam Smith in 1776. Bernie Sanders proudly calls himself a socialist and advocates vast increases in taxes and government power. The history of the past century, from the Soviet Union’s fall to the impending collapse of Venezuela, amply shows that a socialist economy isn’t only “rigged”—to borrow one of Mr. Sanders’s favorite words—it doesn’t work.
Messrs. Trump and Sanders have been led astray by zero-sum thinking, or the assumption that economic magnitudes are fixed when they are in fact variable.
Read the rest of this WSJ op-ed HERE.

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