It may have been Joe Biden’s inauguration, but Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders stole the show with a pair of knitted mitten that went viral on social media for their kitschy New England charm.
While the Photoshopped memes and retweets went wild, thousands asked were they could buy a pair, overwhelming the Vermont teacher who knitted them for Sanders.
But those hoping to buy a pair made popular by a socialist were quickly given a hard lesson into how government intervention destroys innovation.
“Yeah, I think my Gmail has crashed now,” Jen Ellis tells Slate, who tracked down the Essex Junction teacher and knitter. “My report cards are due tomorrow, so I need to focus on some other things until the weekend, when this will probably not be a thing anymore.”
Ellis knitted the mittens for Sanders, using old sweaters and imitation fleece made from recycled plastic bottles, as her own form of consolation prize after he lost the 2016 Democratic nomination contest to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I thought, ‘I’d like to make him a pair of mittens.’ And I did,” Ellis told Slate. “I totally remember the night I did it. I was thinking to myself, ‘Is this crazy? I don’t even know this guy.’ But I wanted to make them for him, so I did.”
Apparently Sanders liked them enough to hang on to them for four years and wear them to a nationally-televised presidential inauguration.
But people asking Ellis if she could sell them a pair got some bad news.
She won’t sell them because of government taxes on business.
“People have been contacting me thinking that they can get mittens, and actually they can’t. I don’t have any more, and I don’t have much of a mitten business anymore because it really wasn’t worth it,” Ellis told Slate. “Independent crafters get really taken for a ride by the federal government. We get taxed to the nth degree, and it wasn’t really worth it pursuing that as a business, even as a side hustle.”
Ellis still makes them as gifts and supports Sanders’ socialist platform despite her own admission taxation makes her hobby impractical as a career.
The post Bernie’s Viral Mittens Conceal a Sad Truth About Socialism appeared first on American Action News.
from American Action News https://ift.tt/3opzkry
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J