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“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” New York Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) declared recently. “You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth… you have to create a myth of earning it.”
Of course, AOC is wrong as usual. The entrepreneurial spirit, risk taking, market savvy, and the work ethic are the ingredients for achieving great success in a capitalist society. Not everyone has what it takes to grab the brass ring. But those who succeed on the merits deserve the rewards for their efforts even if – heaven forbid – it means becoming a billionaire in the process. They earned it.
AOC is not only ignorant about basic economics. She is also clueless about American history. According to AOC, “The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time.”
Wrong again. “No taxation without representation” was the rallying cry leading up to the American Revolution, which the colonists fought valiantly to free themselves from a distant monarchy, not ‘against the billionaires of their time.’” The Founding Fathers believed in private property rights and economic liberty. The richest among them helped to finance the American Revolution!
As Texas Senator Ted Cruz wrote, “If a 9th grader writes this on her history test, she gets an F. It was literally a revolution against oppressive GOVERNMENT…the very thing @aoc wants to inflict on all of us. And the Revolution was financed by American free enterprise…the ‘billionaires’ of that time.”
AOC claims to be for American workers. She said that “working people are getting screwed, and giving people a fair shake means we must have a grown conversation about reigning in abuse of power.”
AOC should look in the mirror. In 2019, she took a victory lap for helping to kill a tax incentive deal for Amazon to build a new headquarters in New York City, which could have brought 25,000 good paying jobs to the city. “Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world,” boasted the socialist congresswoman.
No, it was the day that a power-hungry socialist sabotaged a huge opportunity for working people.
Amazon executive chairman and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos did not hold back in refuting AOC’s latest class warfare rhetoric. Mr. Bezos, a self-made man, provided a simple example of how a free-market economy works that even AOC should be able to understand if she got rid of her Marxist filter.
“Let me give you a simple example,” Jeff Bezos told anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin during a CNBC interview. “Let’s say you start a burger joint, and you have ten employees, and you make a little bit of money, right? This is one outlet. And by the way, these are the most delicious burgers in the world. People love your burgers, Andrew. And so then you open a second outlet, right? And now you’re making a little bit more money, and you have 20 employees. And you open a third outlet. By the time you’ve opened 1,000 outlets, you are a billionaire, right? And by the way, this is a real-life story. It happens all the time. It’s In-N-Out Burger. It’s, you know, Raising Cane’s Chicken. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical? It didn’t. There was one outlet, and then there were two, and then there were three. The way you make $1 billion or $100 million or $10 million or anything is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with $1 billion, right?”
Right! If an entrepreneur creates a product or service that customers value and, along the way, creates thousands of full-time jobs with decent benefits, the entrepreneur is entitled to enjoy the wealth that flows from his or her endeavors.
But AOC is a demagogue who would rather appeal to people’s emotions with divisive harangues than appeal to their intellect with reasoned discourse. Like her fellow socialists, such as Senators Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, she loves to demonize successful people who become wealthy because of their skills and risk-taking investments to grow their businesses.
In a stinging rebuke of feckless government-run enterprises that socialists love to foist on the rest of us, Mr. Bezos said, ““If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, the packages would take 6 weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it anyway.”
Ronald Reagan said it best about big government nearly four decades ago: “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Add demonization of the rewards of successful entrepreneurship in a capitalist economy and you have AOC’s philosophy in a nutshell.
