Socialist upstart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to give a whole lot of people a whole lot of things for free. But don’t you dare call her plans “free stuff.”
The Washington Examiner reported last week that the New York Democrat blasted critics at an event, decrying those who criticize her plans as handouts. “These are public goods,” she said. “They’re public goods. I don’t want to hear the term ‘free stuff’ ever again. I am already hearing from some of these neoliberal folks who are trying to flip the script on us.”
She followed up on Twitter, remarking, “Public education, libraries, & infrastructure policies (which we‘ve had before in America and elsewhere in the world!) are not ‘free stuff.’”
This rant is typical of Ocasio-Cortez — equal parts dishonest and inaccurate. Whether she likes the rhetorical framing or not, many of her proposals, which range from the provision of free housing to free pre-k, very clearly fit the definition of “free stuff.”
What else could one call her landmark “free college” proposal? Ocasio-Cortez has proposed having taxpayers pick up the tab for all students, making public college tuition-free. She argues that this isn’t a giveaway and that claims to the contrary are dishonest rhetoric. “Like when we’re talking about tuition-free public college or when we talk about public housing they say, ‘Oh, well, I don’t want to pay for a millionaire’s kid to go to college,’” she said. “That’s their, like, jujitsu on us that they’re trying to pull.”
But that isn’t jujitsu, it’s a real concern that goes beyond ideology. The liberal Brookings Institution found that “students from higher income families would receive a disproportionate share of the benefits of free college.” Likewise, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, like California Gov. Ronald Reagan decades before him, has pointed out the unfairness of people who never had the opportunity to go to college paying for those who can.
The socialization of higher education is a regressive policy — a policy of “free stuff” that especially benefits the wealthy and socially upscale.
Ocasio-Cortez’s repeated assertion that free college and free healthcare are “public goods” is just factually incorrect. Economists define a “public good” as one that is both nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. The latter criterion means that not only are people not excluded from a good but also that it wouldn’t even be possible to exclude them from it. For example, you cannot make tax resisters breathe dirtier air from a separate atmosphere, so clean air is a nonexcludable good. Likewise, national defense benefits everyone; you cannot have military protection removed from you personally, even if you wanted that.
Higher education and healthcare obviously fail this test. Unlike clean air and national defense, they are consumed individually. Students can be prevented from enrolling. Individual patients can be prevented from making appointments if they do not pay. We can give them away at taxpayer expense, to be sure, but they remain private goods. These services are also rivalrous. Higher education requires professors and graders. That alone means it isn’t a public good, even if it is given away for free. Healthcare is even more rivalrous, given the limited number of providers.
So Ocasio-Cortez, who, ironically, earned a degree in economics, doesn’t seem to understand the terms she uses to make her arguments. But there is at least one sense in which she is right about her proposals not constituting “free stuff.” The stuff she wants to give away is not “free” at all. Your taxes will have to increase massively to pay for it.
