Speaking to a rally to promote the lunatic Green New Deal that would bankrupt America while allowing China, India, and the rest of the world to continue to emit CO2 without restriction for more than a decade, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed the fount of her economic thinking: Karl Marx.
Fittingly, she was accompanied by avowedly socialist presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders at a rally at Howard University, where both radical politicians denounced anything short of a full commitment to the radical restructuring of our economy.
Obviously alluding to frontrunner Joe Biden’s less than full-throated support of the GND, Ocasio-Cortez said there is “no middle ground,” setting up a potential third-party green/socialist absolutist challenge should Biden win the Dems’ nomination.
But most interesting to me was Ocasio-Cortez’s descent into the logic of her position, compared to the logic of markets:
“What we fighting against- what we fighting against is a logic that says it is ok to pay someone less than they need to live, and we are here to say no more.”
Here is a video of the portion of her speech where she touched on her economic principles. I notice that she is gesticulating more emphatically than in the past, and seems, if anything, more impassioned than before:
By tying pay to what people need, rather than to the value of the work they produce (to anyone willing to pay for it), she echoes one of Karl Marx’s most famous dicta (from the 1874 Critique of the Gotha Program):
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
That seemingly humane principle for valuing work is the key to both the idealistic appeal of communism and its tragic consequences for those who embrace and follow it.
Under it, people who do not produce as much as they earn are incentivized, impoverishing the rest of society.
The most vivid illustration of this phenomenon was presented by the late Peter Drucker, in a lecture of his I attended in the 1980s.
He recounted his visits to factories in both East and West Germany that derived originally from the prewar Zeiss optical works.
In the East German works, employment had remained the same as it had been prewar – if I recall, the number of employees there was huge, well over 10,000.
No investment or effort was devoted to efficiency improvements since they would only diminish employment that provided sustenance “according to their needs” for the workforce.
Meanwhile, in the West German works, employment was a tiny fraction, and yet the output was more highly valued on world markets.
As a result, East Germans lived at a much lower level of consumption than West Germans, who, because they valued work and the products of work according to the market mechanism, mightily prospered.
Ocasio-Cortez is a classic watermelon environmentalist: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Read more and transcript at American Thinker
Bernie and AO-C defend theories that have failed repeatedly.
Capitalism, however is their Public Enemy #1.
The watermelons as well call them their Green on the Outside and Red on the Inside
The biggest flaw in “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” is it ignores motivation. If you are not going to get more, then why do it. I am an excellent example of this. As an aerospace engineer I came up with solutions that had large financial impacts. Yet, if I didn’t think I would be rewarded, I wouldn’t have invested the time, money, and stress to get my engineering degree.
AO-C hated the Little Red Hen.
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, Bul Sht.
AOC is what we call a Watermelon Green on the Outside and Red on the Inside liberal idiots beleive Marxism and Socialism with save the Planet but t heir wrong and their Dumb
One has to wonder what type of Economics is taught at BU since AOC apparently has a degree in Econ from that school. Either they teach Marxist Econ or she learned nothing from simple classes like Micro Economics.