On Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz squared off in a CNN debate about the future of health care in the United States. As might be expected from an event pitting the country’s most well-known social democrat against one of the GOP’s most reactionary, Ayn Rand–loving conservatives, the discussion inevitably turned to larger questions of political economy.

Over and over, Sanders admirably stressed issues of distribution and inequality. He noted that, while the Affordable Care Act extended coverage to millions of Americans, many still can’t afford the health care they need. He argued vigorously for expanding Medicare to all Americans and allowing the government to use its negotiating power to lower the prices of pharmaceuticals and other medical goods and services. And, moving the debate beyond health care, he assailed Cruz for his tax plan, which would funnel billions of dollars to the rich.

Cruz’s predictable response to Sanders’s arguments, which contrasted pharmaceutical CEOs raking in millions of dollars and average Americans struggling to afford their prescriptions, was to turn to hoary red-baiting, claiming that Sanders, like all socialists, was really hell-bent on dictating the amount of money every American was allowed to make. The European and Nordic countries that Sanders championed, Cruz insisted, were “not doing nearly as well as America.”