In last night’s debate, our Democratic friends seemed intent on telling a story that historically everyone has fallen for, but which no one should — the story of how everything you want can be had for free (because it’s from the government), and the only reason you don’t yet have it is because someone else is screwing you (the private sector). Bernie Sanders, in particular, was simply unable to answer basic questions about how he would pay for all of his utopian schemes. Bernie: when even Hillary Clinton has to rein you in on the scope and range of your proposals, you know you have truly entered a realm of liberalism where no one has gone before.

Winston Churchill once noted that tyrants (specifically fascist tyrants) were more afraid of words than anything else. It would seem the leftist wannabe tyrants of the present are instead more afraid of numbers than anything else. Notice the studious inattentiveness Bernie gave to the questions actually asked of him with regard to the expansion of the state into Americans’ lives. It was the most glaring example of the geriatric wave of the future being simply unwilling to answer the question. He simply could not account for how he would pay for all his fantastic plans, and resorted to his standard trump card (pun intended) of blaming Wall Street and the “1%.”

John Adams made a prescient observation at the very beginning of the Washington administration: “If the poor are to domineer over the rich, or the rich over the poor, we shall never enjoy the happiness of good government.”

And indeed this gets to the two fundamental flaws in Bernie Sander’s no doubt well-intended, but fallacious worldview: first, he believes that, functionally, all negative economic outcomes are rigged economic outcomes. This leads to his constant harping on “the rich,” and “Wall Street,” which he considers panaceas for anything evil or foreboding in the world, as if, to use a legal term, one is strictly liable for fitting Bernie’s definition of either. Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, Bernie believes that the economic pie is static: it doesn’t grow, it just exists, and needs to be divided up appropriately.

This is why he was able to talk about a decades-long development of money being “taken” from the middle class by the “1%.” Of course, when he makes such statements, no thought is given to the makeup of either so-called class. No thought is given to the fact that those in the “1%” are certainly not the same folks who were there decades ago, and that an exceptionally small percentage of them got in the “1%” through inherited wealth, let alone are able to stay in the “1%” for any lengthy period of time.

In fact, a study by a Cornell professor confirmed that around 11% of Americans will make it into the “1%” for at least one year during their working lives, while only 5.8% will stay there for two years or more, and only 1.1% will remain for 10 ten or more years. In other words, as the professor who headed up the study noted, “Affluence is dynamic. The 1% really isn’t the 1%. People move around a lot.”  Bernie frequently likes to note how “it is unfair that x number of individuals have y amount of money, when the bottom z% only have…” You know the spiel. But even then, according to the IRS, 72% of the top 400 taxpayers in the United States in the last 22 years remained on that list for only a year, while only 3% were listed for a decade or more.

Of course, such basic and easily ascertainable information is fatal to Bernie’s most basic economic assumptions, which require that the dreaded “1%,” a presumably monolithic group of people, have been stealing from the middle class for decades. The problem? The “1%” must be stealing a whole lot from each other than too, because it is a constantly fluctuating group of people, one which roughly 35 million Americans will make their way into at one point or another.

Hence the reason why Bernie’s “facts” should be “Berned.” His assertions are no doubt well-intended, and genuine. There are few candidates who I respect on a personal level as much as Bernie Sanders. He tells you what he believes and why.

But there is a more personal reason I am immensely skeptical of Bernie’s claim of the moral high ground while simultaneously blaming everything on the dreaded “Wall Street.”

I was there as a teenager in the mid-2000’s. I remember very clearly hearing adults talking about seemingly nothing else except how they’d buy homes, buy second homes, or refinance so they could remodel some part of their house, get a new car, or (since I’m a Californian) buy a cabin up in Tahoe. It was ubiquitous, constant, and all-pervasive. And these were all good, decent people.

Wall Street deserves a lot of blame for our economic woes. So do others, including the government.

But if any politician tries to tell you that it was only Wall Street, or only the government, they are simply not being honest with you. You know who was also a big part of the problem? US. Regular people. Middle class folks. Joe-shmoes. We experienced, and continue to experience, the results of a cultural decay that has affected all areas of our society, not some hermetically sealed segment of it. We all became part of the materialistic rat race to keep up with the Jones’.

This is, in my opinion, quite clear in light of the realities of human nature and history.

So by all means, blame Wall Street. Blame the government. But, no matter what any politician may tell you, by no means forget the person who tends to play the greatest role in where you end up in life: yourself.

But of course, that is precisely what Bernie’s worldview cannot abide by: a constituent who first examines his own actions, the actions of his neighbors, his community, his city, and his state, before he engages in the intellectually sloppy work of atonement through abstraction. Bernie’s worldview requires a bogeyman, a luciferian agent of Manichean schemes of plunder and theft, and thus attracts an increasingly narcissistic American electorate far more at ease blaming their problems on outside forces rather than anything closer to home, or God forbid within their own hearts. The Bern’s story fits with ominous perfection the moral and spiritual vacuum of too many of the average 21^st century American citizens.

No wonder John Adams, nearing the end of his life, observed: “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to liberty, and few nations, if any, have found it.”