What Bernie Sanders Gets Wrong About America’s Founding
Recently on the campaign trail at Liberty University, Bernie Sanders took the occasion to denounce the founding fathers, claiming that America was created on “racist principles.” It is common for academics and politicians alike to believe that America’s founding principles are illegitimate due to the founding father’s failure to apply their ideas of liberty and equality to racial minorities.
The architects of our founding owned slaves and are commonly quoted for racially ignorant remarks. This combined with a history that includes the unjust treatment of African Americans may lead one to question the legitimacy of America’s founding principles.
Although are American principles racist? It is likely the opposite, as the free-market economic system endorsed by the founders has allowed people of all backgrounds both domestic and international to build astronomical amounts of wealth. Although the initial scope of application for economic liberty was limited, it has been expanded over the years to both racial minorities and foreign nations, which allowed billions of people to bring themselves out of extreme poverty.
Due to the economic success of the United States, nations around the world started to implement free-market principles into their own economies. Entities that embraced a free-market economy, or one which was freer than their counterparts had a higher degree of growth. In the 1950s, the presidents of Ghana and the Ivory Coast made a bet over which countries economy would be more successful. Ghana’s economy at the time was heavily controlled, while the Ivory Coast was more capitalistic in nature. The president of the latter nation won the bet.
The Ivory Coast then began to de-liberalize its economy in the 1980s, with according results. Africa is historically poor but is becoming increasingly warm to free-markets, and nations that embrace economic-freedom are more likely to achieve monetary success, as the Heritage Foundation points out in a study on the matter. Africa’s economy is on track to become as large as America’s by 2050.
This comports with the success of the free-market so-called Asian Tigers. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore were all poverty-stricken at the turn of the 20th century, but allowed goods to be freely produced and traded, and ended the century with some of the strongest economies in the world.
Most economies before the United States were heavily controlled. In feudal Europe, the majority of the population were peasants, who were forbidden from migrating beyond the reach of their lord. They were told which crops to grow and what goods to produce. As the age of exploration began and markets developed, royal governments created the mercantilist system, a rigged environment in which only certain companies had the right to sell certain products without being subject to a heavy tax.
A goal of mercantilism was to maximize revenue for the state. The ruling class at the time had little concept of a free-market and believed that a monarch must allocate labor and capital for goods to be produced efficiently. And to maximize efficiency, they must promote certain companies and suppress others.
On the contrary, the economic model endorsed by the founders was based on the rights of the individual to pursue their own self-interest. Under such premises, the production of goods and services are coordinated by prices determined by supply and demand. If there is too little of something, prices will rise and more will be produced, and if there is too much of something, prices will drop and less will be produced. And if a new product is good and fairly priced, it will be used and vice versa, creating a form of product evolution.
America increased its wealth at a faster rate than the then more advanced economies of Europe because resources, capital, and human ingenuity were more efficiently allocated due to market forces. This allowed the United States to build the largest economy in the world.
Among some of the biggest winners due to the implementation of the founder’s economic model are notably not white. The right of the individual to own property, buy and sell freely, and keep what one produces has nothing to do with the race of the individual. If America had been founded with a command economy, it is safe to assume that the same gross racism would still have taken place, just like how racial minorities were treated under centrally led regimes like Nazi Germany and the USSR.
Had the United States lost the revolutionary war, free-market capitalism may not have spread throughout the world the way it did, and much of the world would still be in poverty. This is how the founding father’s ideas made everyone better off, despite their initial scope of application. The dismissal of capitalism because of America’s racist past is nothing short of a poor argument.
