Sunday, August 5, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a Capitalist



I have received many emails that have included a link to a Fox News story that reports  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was once a capitalist.

While she attended Boston University she claimed to be a follower of "Adam Smith’s analyses" and wrote in a blog post that terms like “feminism” and “empowerment” were “relics from the past.”

She also wrote:
We no longer live in the same fight for equality of prior generations, we have moved to the widely accepted reality that marginalizing 50% of a given population doesn’t make much sense, mathematically or socially...
But this is not a complete picture of the student Cortez. She also wrote at the time that she believed in "Pablo Neruda’s love."

Neruda was a poet who was a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. He was also for an extended period an admirer of the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.

Upon Stalin's death, Neruda wrote an ode to him and later one to Fidel Castro.

Simultaneously holding the analytical views of Smith and the poetry of Neruda in one's mind must have been quite the BU mental trip for Cortez.

But it does not surprise me that the socialist thinking of Cortez has bloomed and the Adam Smith thinking has withered.

One can only imagine the half-baked "free market" perspective she was taught at BU. The current faculty is filled with methodologically confused econometricians and whacked out Keynesians.

She was never presented with a sound grounding in free market economics or an appreciation for liberty. And with the current explosion in cultural Marxist thinking, it is not difficult to see how she got caught up in that nonsense, especially because of her political aspirations.

One has to realize that Cortez is not a deep or original thinker. She is simply an effective communicator of leftist echo-chamber thinking (She is a fairly high-level dealer in second hand ideas). And in the Age of Trump, this is an effective message to deliver in many parts of the country--in particular the Bronx.

Her one time, college years, shout out to Adam Smith's "analyses" is not as significant as is the likelihood that she was provided a very distorted picture of capitalism that has sent her off on a very wrong path. And, perhaps more significant, her political desires are pushing her in the direction of demagoguery--which never mixes with free markets and liberty.

-RW  

5 comments:

  1. It is her severely impaired analytical skills and total lack of knowledge that make her a star with "progressives". Not Trump with his dog's breakfast economics.

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  2. When she first got national media attention her mother's comment about her gave it all away. She wants power. And when someone wants power they cannot be burdened with a belief system. They will say and do what gets them power.

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    1. That's what I was going to say. This sort of fuels my notion that she is the result of things that have been brewing much longer than Trump has been in office. She is a opportunist predator filling an open niche that has been waiting for the right person to fill it. Has nobody else seen socialism gaining popularity for the last 20 years? Trump may have helped bring it to a head, but the Republican party has been sending people away to the influence of "the dark side" for years, and I suspect many libertarians are some of the fallout from this. Their fights against gay marriage, pandering to religious institutions and the military industrial complex, and corporatism have been sending people away for years.

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    2. The Duke faculty's reaction to the Duke lacrosse case idiocy 12 years ago was clear evidence that the universities were already being run by evil insane vicious socialists. Nevertheless, Republican legislators kept funding them without restriction.

      Trump is horrible but both Pat Buchanan and I think it's a good thing how he triggers "progressives" to come right out in public and demonstrate what monsters they really are.

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  3. These dumb, utopian notions of socialism, central-planning and reverence for government authority are sown in public schools, and take years to come to full flowering during the college or twenty-something years.
    Number one priority on our libertarian to-do list is to abolish government schools and create a wall of separation between education and state. (And after that, we abolish the Fed and the Income Tax).

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