The trouble with socialism

By Dale Cooper

Proclaiming victory over the rapacious capitalists of Amazon who had tried to set up shop in Long Island City, a decaying neighborhood of New York City. Amazon had planned to hire 25,000 workers earning an average of $150,000 per year, spend billions of dollars building office towers, all of which would create some 67,000 new service sector jobs. You’d think the city would welcome all that with open arms.

Think again! Social justice warriors and community activists, including self-declared socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) went up in arms! In a matter of weeks they “defeated” the nasty capitalists, who decided to take their jobs elsewhere. Afterwards AOC tweeted “a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world.” Notwithstanding the fact that most workers would love to be exploited with $150,000 salaries, and most communities would be happy to give Amazon what amounted to a small break on municipal and state taxes, AOC and her social justice warriors went absolutely apoplectic.

When facing push-back for her triumph over capitalism, AOC replied “If we’re willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers, we can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money if we wanted to.” Of course any rational person would understand that New York wasn’t “paying” Amazon $3 billion to locate in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. It was simply 10% reduction of the $30 billion the company would pay in taxes over its first 10 years in NYC.

But AOC apparently didn’t understand this. This Democratic Representative from Queens (NY14), an economics graduate of Boston University, thought she could spend $3 billion that doesn’t exist and will never exist. The whole sorry episode reeks of sloppy thinking, educational failure and sound-bite politics. In other words it’s the perfect metaphor for Socialism.