What he's really trying to accomplish is a 4th house.
Bernie's no mystery. And it doesn't matter why he thinks it's a good idea because it's not.

We already know what the goal is: maximized opportunity to prosper, for everyone.
And we already know the only way to get there: Individual liberty and a free market.
Sometimes the right answer is simply: "leave it alone."
Control freaks like Sanders will never accept that approach. They can't help it. There has to be a knob they can tweak... they just know it. They at least want the authority to try, because that authority is power; and they'll get rich whether it works or not. Which it won't.

I have to disagree with your statement. True justice is not about equality, it's about rights.
You have a natural right to pursue happiness in any way you desire, using any and all assets at your disposal; which does not include any of my assets. I'm using those to pursue my own happiness.

Free education can be dismissed at the very premise, there's no need for debate. It's predicated on the idea that the State has sovereignty over you, and the right to seize your "effects" (in this case, money) on their own initiative... purportedly for the "Common Good", all of which is incorrect. ...next idea.

If the majority decides they want your money to pay for someone else's education, that still does not give them the right to take it. It doesn't even matter that the whole idea would further destroy the entire institution of education, which is hardly worth saving any more anyway.

@rway Bernie is just after a 4th house? Maybe, but I’d rather not assume that and would like to be absolutely certain that was true before I concluded that. Concluding Bernie was just in it for the money is a convenient conclusion for anyone wanting to just dismiss his idea and not have to discuss it. We know the “what” of his idea but not the “why”. It’s too easy to just assume you are right and that everyone that disagrees with you is just wrong and a moron. Isn’t it strange that everyone does that and it only ever leads to fights? Why so much fighting and how could both sides be so convinced that their opponent is just a moron? Both sides have the same opinion of themselves and their opponents, and it seems to escape their notice that in the way that they disagree, “I’m right, and they are a moron”, they are exactly the same as their opponent. How’s that for irony? It’s a mirror, and both sides are really pointing at themselves in so far as they act the exact same as the opponent that they are pointing at.

I’m not sure where I stand on free markets, but I know they don’t just work themselves out. I’m sure you can always make a market highly inefficient by tinkering with it, but not all tinkering is inherently detrimental. There is a reason why our government opposes monopolies. If one giant company fully saturates a market, they become the full law of that market and what they say goes. Without competition, there is no requirement to allow the economic principles around supply vs demand to dictate pricing. The giant company just decides, and if you want what they are offering you have no other options and have to comply. This phenomenon of side-stepping the economics of supply vs demand has many different ways to be achieved and in a totally free market there is nothing to stop them from happening.

When you say justice is about rights and not equality is it possible that both are true? Or maybe you are speaking about what is a just right, and I am speaking about ensuring that just rights are available to all? Your example is that every person has a right, to both pursue their own happiness with their own assets AND to not have someone else infringe upon their assets without consent. These are rights that all people have in equal measure. I am saying that justice seeks to ensure the rights of every person equally, in an unbiased, and consistent manner.

Free education can be safely dismissed, there is no free lunch. However, Bernie is the one seeking free education and we should not dismiss Bernie or people like him, because he will just come back later anyway. There is a reason why Bernie wants what he wants, dismissing him without figuring out why is lazy and irresponsible.

@datguy If you're really unsure about why he thinks free education is a good idea, that's clearly his fault for not articulating it effectively. Bernie has done almost literally nothing for his entire adult life except run his mouth in public about his bad ideas, and he's been actively campaigning on them for much of this decade.
It's not really his fault, there's no way to explain why it's a good idea... simply because it's not.
The degree of public involvement that we have already, has just about completely destroyed the entire institution; which used to be a pinnacle of Western Civilization. And now he wants complete public control, at a time when we desperately need to get the government out of the education business. A business in which they were not originally chartered to intervene in the first place.
The only thing he's ever accomplished is to make himself rich, and he's done so quite successfully. That doesn't sound like a moron, just another greedy hypocrite. If greed wasn't his only motivation, then he's a failure at whatever else he had in mind.
You're right, there have always been "Bernie's" and there always will. Bernie, himself, is irrelevant. It's bad ideas that are perennial. We don't need to understand Bernie. We need to understand why his ideas are destructive and unjust; and be prepared to recognize them the next time they emerge in perhaps slightly different form. First, we need to reestablish a shared understanding of what our values and principles even are. Only then can we categorically dismiss, with the confidence of unity and equal-voice, proposals that would violate those principles.
That boils down to the failure of education, like so many other contemporary issues; if not all of them.

How is it that you know free markets don't work themselves out?
No monopoly has ever emerged in a truly free market, it's taken government protections every time.
Indeed, I don't think a truly free market has ever existed. But it seems that all of our "necessary" adjustments are simply reactions to suppress the damage from previous interventions. And in a global economy, the notion of a truly free market seems pretty much unachievable anyway. It's only free if it's free throughout, and other countries don't want to participate. It's like nukes... other countries have tariffs, so we need bigger and better tariffs to counter theirs. And the beat goes on.
But, the argument for a free market is not a purely economic one. It's not right because it works... it works because it's right. The concept is the only appropriate economic model in a free society. Like any other ideal, we benefit from continuously approaching it to whatever extent we are able... even if the absolute realization is unlikely. The concept is simple: every single transaction, should be entered into freely and voluntarily by both parties. There's no more to it than that. There's no sound argument against it, one that can support the idea that it is somehow "right" to coerce one of the parties into a transaction against their will. That's a self-refuting proposition, since it violates the very notion of what is right in the first place.
"Tinkering" with the market has almost zero chance of having a positive outcome. That's mathematically true of any complex system that you don't understand completely before you start tinkering. The economy is like the weather. We understand pretty well what makes rain happen, but can't tell you with any significant degree of certainty if it's going to rain next week... there are just too many variables; many of which we are not even aware of.
Similarly, nobody completely understands the economy. Nobody. There are simply too many unpredictable variables. The only responsible thing to do is what we know is right, and to otherwise leave it alone.
So, not only is tinkering just a bad idea, it's a moot idea anyway because we don't have the right to coerce individual transactions.
It's one of our many tragedies that the government just does it anyway, because we let them get away with it.
Again, that boils down to the failure of education.

Is justice about rights or equality... well, that depends on what you mean by equality.
Natural rights apply to everybody, so to that extent both are true. But a more popular measure of "equality" these days is the final tally: equality of outcome, or: "equity". That is not justice, it's "Social Justice"; which is to say: injustice. Whenever you see a qualifier applied to an absolute concept like Justice, it is likely a corruption of that very concept. Absolutes don't have qualifiers... that just creates an oxymoron. Or redundancy, I guess. It could just be for the sake of conversation, but it just adds obfuscation. Obfuscation is a tool of deception, not clarity. It's either an unnecessary distinction, or a malicious one.
Anyway, your outcome is not a function of your rights, it's a function of what you do with those rights; and that's entirely up to you. When somebody else intercedes, they do so in violation of your rights.
It does sound like we're on the same page as far as the overall goal is concerned. And that goal: unbiased and consistent protection of rights for everyone, necessarily precludes the entire ruse of "Social Justice".

Roads run in both directions, you have to go back over those same ideas to get back out and understand why they didn’t work, herein lies part of the problem

@BikerPetehall70
great point. That's why I think the root of pretty much all of our major "issues" is the corruption of Education.
Also why nationalizing education is one of the 10 Planks of Communism from the Manifesto.
One of the most urgent and important things we need to do, is to get the federal government out of the education business.