Bernie Sanders Exhibits the Traits of the Billionaires He Loathes

Forget love and all that crap
I'm just trying to keep my pockets fat...
You call me greedy but you know it's true-
That you want money too!

-Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, "I Need Money"

Like former pastor Mike Huckabee, Bernie Sanders hates sin, specifically the deadly one called greed. Sanders, an avowed socialist, wants to take money from billionaires and give it to non-billionaires, in an apparent effort to make everyone middle-class and no one greedy. He will, by some feat of moral-political alchemy, create prosperity and eliminate avarice.

Speaking to a crowd of supporters this month, Sanders said, "The greed of the billionaire class and corporate America is destroying this great country." In his view, rich people have no place in the world's richest country.

This is a common refrain of his. In March, he railed "against the power of a billionaire class whose greed has no end." He is, he said, "for dignity [and] against the greed and power of a few on top who apparently want it all." He is, in other words, against material success.

In 2010, he accused rich people of harboring "a religious ferocity in terms of greed. They need more, more. It is similar to an addiction." For his part, Sanders displays an equally religious ferocity when attacking sinners (the rich) and denouncing their sin (greed). Not only does he hate the rich for being rich; he hates the rich for wanting to be rich. Rather than letting people exercise their greed, Sanders wants to exorcise it-an impossible task, as most socialist enterprises are.

"What we are saying to the billionaire class is, ‘Your greed, which is destroying this country, has got to end,'" he fumed last month. What he does not say, at least not with any clarity, is how he proposes to abolish it.

Fortunately for Sanders, greedy billionaires, who have a monopoly on everything but Sanders' soul, make for an ideal hobgoblin, since they have no spokesmen and are disparaged by everyone not named Koch.

"Big business is willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits," Sanders said. "I regard that as just incomprehensible." I regard this comment as similarly incomprehensible.

What I do comprehend is his disdain for the rich, and for the profit motive. It is an ancient and antiquated hostility. "The love of money," the Bible declares, "is the root of all evil." Not just evil-all evil.

What about Sanders? Is he greedy? Not by his standards. For him, greed is the exclusive province of capitalists. That he garnered more than $200,000 in income last year is immaterial, since he was toiling for the benefit of non-billionaires.

But Sanders is greedy in another, more pernicious way. He is greedy for power. After all, that is why he is running for president. "This is not an education campaign," he said. "I am in this election to win." He seeks not wealth but the power to redistribute it. Sanders is a greedy socialist, which is not an oxymoron. Like the billionaire class he so loathes, Sanders craves money-other people's.

By denouncing financial greed, he demonstrates why political greed is worse. Sanders says that money buys politicians, but he ignores a more salient fact: politicians get to decide whose wealth-and how much of it-to confiscate, and for what purpose.

Sanders is not the first, nor shall he be the last, to fulminate against greed or to appropriate a biblical commandment for political purposes. He is lucky the Ten Commandments do not forbid the coveting of thy neighbors' votes.

Greed is neither a vice nor a virtue. It is simply a fact of human existence. Those who decry the evils of avarice and ambition might as well decry the evils of the periodic table.

Everyone is greedy for something-capitalists for money, socialists for capitalists' money, lobbyists for influence, Californians for water, Donald Trump for attention, Bill Cosby for unconscious females (allegedly), writers for readers.

For more on this topic, you can buy (multiple copies of) my book, The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, which has a section on greed (page 120), on Amazon.