Buckle up, folks, for a frightening fairy tale.

Once upon a time, Andy bought cheese from Bob. But then Andy decided he wanted instead to buy cheese from Charlie, a very poor person who lives overseas. (If you prefer, make the story that Andy specifically bought cheese from Charlie’s employer, rather than Charlie.) As a result of Andy’s decision, Charlie went from being very poor (by absolute and world standards) to middle income. But sadly Bob went from being very rich to plain old rich. Bob got so pissed off by this that he hired Trogdor the Berninator to scare Andy into buying cheese from Bob again. As a result, Charlie become poor again. Further, Desi, who was just about to start making cheese with Charlie to sell to Andy, also remained desperately poor.

The moral of the story?: Bob and Trogdor are vile and contemptible assholes. If they were to defend their actions using moral language, that would be a real hoot.

I like using the phrase “bad at leftism” for people who have left-wing sympathies but who support policies and ideas inconsistent with those sympathies. (By that definition, most leftists are bad at leftism, of course.)

Bernie Sanders is bad at leftism. As I’ve discussed before, he’s quite literally a dude who favors using violence and threats of violence to hurt third world laborers in order to benefit relatively rich people.

That remark concerned his economically illiterate hate-mongering about immigration. But here are a few pieces making the same point about trade:

Sanders is the Developing World’s Worst Nightmare

Sanders and Global Poverty at Vox

I could see an intelligent leftist saying that sure, Sanders sucks, but every other major candidate is worse. That’s a plausible view. But let’s be clear: Sanders wants to hurt genuinely poor people in order to benefit rich people. The most pessimistic and negative view that one could reasonably hold about free trade over the past 30 years is that trade has been a massive benefit for most people, especially people in the third world. Rates of absolute poverty are plummeting. Now, perhaps this has hurt a minority of first-world workers in the short run (though even that’s a controversial claim). But if so, so what?

UPDATE: I doubt Sanders actually hates foreign brown and yellow-skinned people and wants, de dicto, to hurt them. But nevertheless he advocates policies which hurt them. So, it occurs to me that smart racists should just advocate the same things misinformed leftists advocate.