Entering the Lion's Den, and Surviving, Bernie Sanders Style

BERNIE SANDERS HAS SAND. Whatever else you say about Sanders, that he is old, that he is a socialist, that he needs a hair cut, he has the true grit. He went straight to Liberty University, a bastion of religious dogma and economic neo-liberalism, and gave a good old fashioned stump speech.The speech, predictably, was well attended and lukewarmly received. Although the Christians damned Sanders with faint praise and near silent applause, they didn't, much to their christian charity credit, run him out of the joint. They seemed to respect him for being there, for having entered the lion's den, so to speak, and addressing America's grotesque economic inequality from a moral perspective. Good move, Bernie. Like everyone else on the right wing, the students and faculty at Liberty want the U.S. government to leave the economy alone, and to concern itself directly with the interior of the female pregnant body. They agree with Sanders that something ought to be done to help the twenty percent of America's children who live in poverty, but they do not agree that the central government should force people to do it. Before a child is born, its life should be protected by legislation, but after it is born, it should depend of free market forces to take it from there. The first church of Christ and Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism, for those who don't know, is what everyone in the world except American's calls laizzez faire, trickle down, supply side, Reaganonimcs, which is a philosophy long discredited by credible economists. Even Adam Smith, the describer of the free market's invisible hand, clearly stated that all government action to help workers is justified, and that government action to help business owners is never justified. The dirty little secret is that even the father of modern free market capitalism understood that the free market is a way of exploiting labor, since labor is a resource, available for exploitation. That lesson has been lost, it would seem, on the minions at Liberty, and the rest of the conservative community. But if people like Bernie Sanders keep showing up at conservative venues, it may well be that "render unto Caesar" will eventually sink in, the Lord's will will, at long last, be done.