Super Tuesday may have been the beginning of the end for the Bernie Sanders campaign, but the ideas that propelled it are likely to linger for quite some time. With some writers comparing Bernie to Ron Paul (not in terms of economics and philosophy, of course, but as insurgent candidates), now seemed like an opportune moment to examine the Sanders message and legacy, and compare it to Ron's.

Like Ron, Bernie surprised all the pundits with his fundraising, polling, and electoral success. In fact, so successful has Sanders been that Hillary Clinton has been reduced to a pathetic and unconvincing "me, too" campaign – I can be just like Bernie, if that's what you rubes want!

Bernie has gained a lot of traction from his complaints that Hillary is in the tank for Wall Street and the big banks. He's likewise pointed to the six-figure honoraria Hillary has earned from speeches given to the big banks.

The best the now-hapless Bill Clinton could do in reply was to note that Bernie, too, had been paid to give speeches. Technically, Bill was right. Bernie had earned money from public speaking: a whopping $1800 over the course of a year. The year before that, Bernie had earned $1300 from public speaking. All of this money was donated to charity, as is the requirement for U.S. senators.

It's true that Bernie is better than Hillary on foreign policy, but in keeping with Rothbard's Law – everyone concentrates in the area in which he is worst – Bernie speaks very little about issues of war and peace. And even there, consistency and principle are elusive: he supported Bill Clinton's bombing of Serbia over Kosovo, an act of terror based on propaganda that rivaled anything George W. Bush ever peddled. Sanders favors the ongoing drone campaigns, too, and even supported the F-35, one of the biggest boondoggles in the Pentagon's long and sorry history.

Bernie's primary legacy will be to have resuscitated the idea of socialism in the minds of many Americans. It is a very confused socialism, to be sure. The young people who follow Bernie can't even seem to define socialism, according to recent surveys. And in fact Bernie's economics is really just a hyper-Keynesianism rather than out-and-out socialism. But by suggesting that the Scandinavian countries constitute a model that the United States should emulate, he has encouraged the idea that only large-scale, systemic change in the direction of vastly increased government power can produce the kind of society Americans want.

Capitalism ought to be our default position, since it conforms to the basic moral insights we acquired in our youth: keep your word, live up to your agreements, don't take what doesn't belong to you, and do not cause anyone physical harm.

But thanks to years of propaganda to the contrary, socialism has come to appear to many people as not simply a morally plausible position but clearly and obviously desirable and superior to the capitalist alternative. The free market, they are convinced from what they recall from their elementary school textbooks, leads to "monopoly" and oppression.

Bernie speaks as if the system is rigged against the people because of business influence in government – a fair enough point, as far as it goes – but it's hard to take this criticism seriously when his proposed solution is to extend the influence of politics over more and more areas of life and increase the powers and scope of the very government he is supposed to be criticizing.

The Sanders narrative is rooted in two major historical claims, both of them dead wrong.

First, Sanders believes "capitalism" was to blame for the 2008 crash. But as LRC readers know, that downturn, like the Great Depression before it, was preceded by years of Federal Reserve credit expansion. According to the Austrian theory of the business cycle, the artificial lowering of interest rates below free-market levels sets in motion an unsustainable economic boom. The economy is set on a path that could be sustained only if real resource availability were greater than it really is. Eventually, when real savings and resources turn out not to exist in the abundance that the Fed's interventions misled people into expecting, projects have to be abandoned and the phony prosperity becomes real recession.