I had no intention of watching the Democrat presidential debate last week. However, my wife started to watch and it wasn’t long before morbid curiosity got the better of me. It was like watching reruns of television shows - like Criminal Minds for example - that I had avoided the first time around.

The ratings bear this out. The most recent Republican debate attracted 57% more viewers. I can see why - the Democrats don’t have anything new to present. They all agree with each other for the most part regarding the same tired old talking points: higher taxes, gun control, bigger government, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Not one candidate mentioned the national debt - not even in passing. Nothing new here, please move along.

The real debate occurred in the media as to who “won”. According to the Drudge Report poll, with over 325,000 votes cast, Bernie Sanders was the runaway winner with 53.8%. Jim Webb was a distant second with 25.5% and Clinton was an even more distant third with 9.25% just ahead of former Maryland Governor O’Malley.

Not everyone was in agreement with Drudge. In fact, the left leaning side of the blogosphere was up in arms crying “foul” over what was perceived as mainstream media bias toward Clinton. The uproar was so intense that it prompted this headline from left leaning news outlet Salon.com, “Bernie Sanders ‘truthers’, step down: There’s no conspiracy to hide that he ‘won’ the debate. Most of the pundit class declared Clinton the debate winner, and now some Sanders supporters are getting paranoid”. Hilarious.

Concerning oneself with who won the Democrat debate is kind of like getting worked up over the results of a WWE wrestling match. It had a clubhouse atmosphere with the 74 year old Sanders, playing the clubhouse lawyer, dismissing the Clinton email scandal as a mere triviality. Apparently Watergate didn’t make much of an impression on him. But on a more personal note, what I also find most interesting about Bernie Sanders is that he would have fit right in at family gatherings at my house growing up. My impulse is to call him Uncle Bernie. He actually has a lot in common with my late father. They were both Brooklyn natives born of Jewish immigrant parents - albeit 15 years apart. Both attended Brooklyn College, although Sanders transferred to the University of Chicago, coincidentally my alma mater, and received his degree from there.

So…whether or not he “won”, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon picked up more steam. He certainly has a P. T. Barnum aura about him. Here’s an example. According to Factcheck.org in a piece called “Sanders Exaggerates Inequality”, Brooks Jackson writes, “Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders claims that ‘in America we now have more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on earth.’ Not really.” Jackson adds, “According to the World Bank 41 countries have greater income inequality than the U.S. And those include Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Argentina. And according to the most recent Global Wealth Databook, the U.S. ranks 16th out of 46 economies studied in the share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent.” Now I’m not saying that income and wealth inequality isn’t a concern, but we can’t even hope deal with an issue without understanding its true scope. Bernie clearly doesn’t.

Here’s another Bernie Sanders conundrum. One of his campaign memes is “free college”. Here’s another classic far left elitist “do as I say, not as I do” routines. You see, as I have already mentioned, Sanders started his college career at Brooklyn College in 1959. At that time it was free (Step right up! It’s free!) - as were all of the CUNY (City University of New York) colleges - for city residents. However, free wasn’t good enough for Bernie. He decided it was better to pay for college and go to a school that is perennially in the US News and World Report top 10.

As Seinfeld would say, “not that there’s anything wrong that”, but there’s more to the story. You see, back in Bernie’s day you at least you had to be accepted into the CUNY system. There were academic standards that qualified students. If you didn’t make the grade, you didn’t get in. However, later on, when I was in high school, not only was CUNY free, but if you graduated from a New York City high school you were guaranteed acceptance into the CUNY system. Progress!

Now the road to socialist utopia might be paved with good intentions, but two things of note happened along the way. The first is that the CUNY system began to deteriorate and many students looking for a quality education decided to look elsewhere. I know, I was one of them, so I wound up at Bernie’s alma mater. The second is that New York City had a fiscal meltdown. On the verge of bankruptcy, in 1975 New York was bailed out by the federal government and a consortium of Wall Street banks. In 1976 (the year I got my college degree), CUNY began to charge tuition. That’s how “free” works, you eventually run out of other people’s money. Someone’s got to pay the freight. Under Bernie’s plan those that would pay the freight would do so by government force through the tax system. You know the routine, if you don’t pay your taxes, someone from the government shows up with a gun and hauls you off to jail.

It is astounding that although he is aware of all of this, Bernie somehow shrugs off reality. Bernie pretends that the laws of economics can be repealed by legislative fiat. If the consumer of a product isn’t the one paying for it, then the supply and demand dynamic is distorted and thrown out of balance. New York City’s experiment with “free” college didn’t end well. The truth is that “free” anything becomes a fiscal if not a moral hazard.

Ironically, when Bernie Sanders arrived at the University of Chicago in 1960 economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were on the faculty. He squandered an opportunity to learn from a couple of heavy weights. On the flip side, currently on the faculty at CUNY is none other than Paul Krugman, who is a rock star to most Bernie Sanders supporters.

If you’re a college professor and a Bernie Sanders “truther”, be careful what you wish for. “Free” college might be fraught with unintended consequences. Higher Education is already an area where the government is heavily involved through loan guarantees, subsidies and other measures. Therefore it should not be a surprise that the price of college tuition has been rising at much a faster rate than the overall rate of inflation. And if you think college is expensive now, wait until its “free”.