
Is There a Libertarian Case for Bernie Sanders? - saeranv
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/is-there-a-libertarian-case-for-bernie-sanders/
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daveqr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
tzs
...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.

~~~
xlm1717
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.

~~~
tzs
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

