Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made so many bizarre assertions about economics, politics, and international relations that her recent revisionist history has gotten lost in the mix. The socialist said during an interview with PBS that capitalism wasn’t long for this world, and that it wasn’t even the norm at the beginning of this country.
“Capitalism has not always existed in the world and it will not always exist in the world,” the Democratic congressional candidate told “Firing Line.” “When this country started, we did not operate on a capitalist economy.”
The first statement may be true because of people like Ocasio-Cortez. The second statement is drivel, the kind of garbage normally reserved for the comments section. To rebut it, just look at what the Founding Fathers wrote about Adam Smith – you know, that one dude heralded as the father of modern capitalism.
Early American politicos adored Smith, whose Wealth of Nations was coincidentally published the same year they drafted their Declaration of Independence. James Madison loved the book so much he included it on the list of books to be added to the congressional library. And after stumbling upon a copy in Paris while serving as minister to France, Thomas Jefferson quickly declared it “the best book extant.”
[Also read: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about the ‘occupation of Palestine’ but she doesn’t know what that means]
Granted those are just two book recommendations, and there were many more arguments among the Founders about the economic direction the nation ought to take. Some will even erroneously point to debates between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to insist that the DNA of this country isn’t capitalist.
But early disagreements over policy issues should not obscure broad agreement on principle. Historian John Nelson writes, “when the causes of the slow dissolution of consensus among America’s ruling elites after ratification of the Constitution are detailed, the evidence points to specific disagreements over programmatic issues and not fundamental schisms over the essential role of government” (emphasis in original).
Did the Founders argue about the different merits of agrarian and manufacturing economic models then? Absolutely. Did they ever waiver on the idea of property rights as the bedrock of liberty? Never.
It was perfectly natural for the Founders to fanboy over Adam Smith because his economic ideas dovetail with their Lockean natural right theory. Individuals are sovereign, they said, and when sovereign individuals apply their labor to some resource, ownership naturally occurs. It is the job of government to defend those property rights.
As Thomas West of Hillsdale College points out, property rights were fundamental to the entire democratic experiment. From the beginning, even before the ratification of the Constitution, the Founders believed infringing on individual property rights was a moral wrong.
The Continental Congress declared, West observes, that “by the immutable laws of nature,” the people “are entitled to property.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights describes property rights as an “inherent” liberty in 1776. Massachusetts described it as “natural, essential, and unalienable.” Four other states copy and pasted the same sort of language in their state constitutions.
Turns out the same colonists who got so angry about taxation without representation took property rights and free markets seriously. This wasn’t just the property of the established. This was the original right to aspire to greater wealth which animates the American dream to this day.
Early Americans didn’t rely on the proverbial benevolence of that butcher, brewer, or baker for their dinner. Like Smith, they relied on the self-interest of merchants. They took it a step further and codified the invisible hand in the Constitution by properly ordering a government to preserve property and allow free markets.
And good thing they did. The market economy is a miracle that has lifted millions from poverty. It’s why Italian immigrants flocked to New York during the last century and why even more immigrants from Ecuador, Mexico, and Bangladesh continue to flock to Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th Congressional District. She might cheer the end of capitalism and make up a revisionist myth about the founding, but they understand the economic promise of this country.
Hopefully her entitled ingratitude and historical ignorance doesn’t ruin that inheritance.
