Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Saturday that capitalism is “irredeemable,” saying, “Capitalism is an ideology of capital — the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit.”
It might be easy to toss this impulsive sentiment aside as yet another example of historical and socio-economical ignorance, and yet it’s so full of irony coming from a woman who is so full of her own virtue she can’t see that her very ability to speak to a crowd as an elected official, recorded with an iPhone and shared through apps, is all the wondrous result of something she hates.
Look around the world. See those successful countries? The ones with booming economies? A healthy, robust people? Those are countries with capitalism at the helm. Point me to a country swimming in prosperity and generosity, and I will show you how capitalism laid the foundation for its very success.
Economist Milton Friedman said: “In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty … the only cases of recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that.” It doesn’t take an economist to see that countries with a more socialist or communist government suffer from the lack of creative competition, among other things, that a free market creates.
Ocasio-Cortez seems to believe capitalism poses a threat to generosity and that people who operate within a free market economy are greedy. Statistics show that’s simply not true. Over and over, the United States is one of the most generous countries in the world — not in spite of capitalism, but because of it.
Known for her “prolific” presence on Twitter and Instagram, could anything be more ironic than a socialist standing on the shoulders of social media giants created in the U.S. as a result of a robust free market economy, shouting, “This is so irredeemable!”
How ignorant, how arrogant, how prosaic.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
