Translation: “I made my money fair and square, so quit hassling me about it.”

It is at this point that we start to see Bernie Sanders undermine his own claims about millionaires, wealth, and capitalism.

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Ryan McMaken

On Monday, Bernie Sanders released ten years of tax returns, and it turns out he’s a millionaire. Thanks especially to revenues from book royalties, Sanders is now, as CNN put it, “in the category of the super-rich.” Or, as some might say, he’s part of “the 1%.”

After years of denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” and a supposed source of America’s economic problems, this information is a little awkward for Sanders.

Some critics of Sanders have claimed this makes him a hypocrite. Here’s a man who trashes millionaires, and yet is one himself.

“Hypocrite,” however, isn’t really the right term here. So long as Sanders pays the taxes he says millionaires should pay, his income alone doesn’t make him a hypocrite. Moreover, Sanders can (plausibly) claim that when he denounced millionaires, he didn’t mean all of them. He just meant 90 percent of them. And he can then include himself in the “good” ten percent.

Nevertheless, Sanders appears not entirely comfortable with his status as a rich man.

When confronted as being among those he has long villainized, Sanders became defensive:

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he declared. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Translation: “I made my money fair and square, so quit hassling me about it.”

It is at this point that we start to see Bernie Sanders undermine his own claims about millionaires, wealth, and capitalism.

Bernie Sanders, Capitalist

For a normal person, Sanders’s defense of his riches would be no big deal. There’s little doubt that a great many wealthy people, when asked how they earned their money, would respond with “I worked for it. I earned it.”

But, when Bernie Sanders says this, it’s quite remarkable.

After all, one of the central myths of the Bernie Sanders wing of the American left is that people who become rich do so on the backs of the poor. Read the rest of this entry »