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Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani have built their political brands around offering people more government programs, more subsidies, more price controls, and more promises that someone else will pay the bill.But place a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics in front of them, and the answer is an immediate, “NO!”It is funny because it feels accurate.All three speak as though wealth simply exists in a giant vault, waiting for politicians to divide it up. They rarely acknowledge that wealth must first be created by people who work, invest, build businesses, take risks, and produce something others value.They talk endlessly about redistributing the results of capitalism while attacking the system that generated those results.Basic economics teaches that incentives matter. Raise the cost of hiring and businesses hire fewer workers. Punish investment and less investment occurs. Cap prices below market levels and shortages develop. Make housing construction more difficult and rents rise. Promise unlimited benefits without controlling costs and taxpayers eventually receive the bill.These are not complicated mysteries. They are predictable consequences.Yet Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani continue selling the same fantasy, government can mandate prosperity, regulate away scarcity, and tax its way into abundance.Reality does not work that way.Government can redistribute money, but it cannot redistribute money that was never created. It can order prices lower, but it cannot force businesses to produce goods at a loss. It can declare housing a right, but that declaration does not build a single apartment.That is why this cartoon works. It captures an entire political ideology in one simple image. The people lecturing America about economics appear unwilling to absorb its most basic lessons.They love the promises of socialism, but they reject the economic facts that reveal why those promises repeatedly fail.Do you think Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani misunderstand basic economics, or do they understand it and simply believe the promises are politically useful?