Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is showing that she didn’t pay much attention in her economics classes – yes, her degree is in economics. For she’s trying to claim that a currency is a public good and in fact ought to be one. This being driven by a rather perverse idea that only governments should provide public goods.
No, a currency isn’t a public good. And there’s nothing at all to suggest that governments should or can be the only suppliers of public goods.…
See MoreQuite how Alice in Wonderland the world view of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is can be shown in this piece of logic from her. That a rich – and presumably powerful – couple of women are being sentenced for a crime shows that we don’t prosecute the rich for breaking the law.
Umm, yes, an actual instance is proof that the thing never happens. Please don’t go into science AOC, the cannonball falling from the tower shows that gravity doesn’t happen.…
See MoreIf you’d like to see the future that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez would like for us all we can use this example – her own – of the $7 croissant. It’s possible to do a slightly deeper dive into the underlying economics but then that would require her to have a knowledge of David Ricardo and some clue as to the notion of rental values. As is described here:
Anyone want to take a punt on what the rent is for a croissant stall at LaGuardia?
Soon enough it’ll be shorter to print a listing of subjects that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez does know about. For she’s shown here that to add to her utter confusion over all matters economic she’s also ignorant of basic US political history. We could try to be fair to her and point out that the gap between the year of her birth and FDR’s last re-election is greater than that between the end of WW II and the death of Queen Victoria.…
See MoreA claim in the Guardian that we’re all being condescending when we claim that varied progressive policies – akin to those being put forward by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez – are unworkable. The thing is though, some ideas put forward by such progressives are unworkable. As are all sorts of other ideas of course.
For example, we cannot gain both local power without long distance trade and also renewable power without fossil fuels or nuclear. Because renewables are inherently intermittent and the only way that we can deal with that is flatten out that variance over large – very large – geographical distances.…
See MoreQuite what the problem Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has with Facebook should be obvious She’s very good indeed at using Twitter to appeal to the masses over and around the mainstream media. Other people are equally good at doing so using Facebook.
The problem AOC has with Facebook is that she doesn’t agree with those who use Facebook. Therefore Facebook shouldn’t exist in its current form.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested that democracy in the US “has a Facebook problem” after the company pulled ads last night that called for tech giants, including Facebook, to be broken up.
Now it’s true that Fox News is rather piling on in glee here over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her non-use of the public transport which the Green New Deal insists is perfect for the proles. But then the pretensions of those who would tell us how we must live are always ripe for a little exploration.
One of the things that used to very much surprise visitors to communist Russia was the Zil lane. The Zil being the vast car (actually, I think, the 1957 Chrysler Imperial, the Soviet Union having bought the stamping plates for the bodywork) that was the perk of the senior apparatchiki.…
See MoreAlexandria Ocasio Cortez is shocked, she says, that lobbyists pay homeless people to wait in line for Congressional hearings. Well, of course AOC is shocked. This is voluntary exchange, this is how markets work – it’s also rationing by that most efficient method, price. Given that she’s either unaware of or disagrees with each of these parts of reality she’s shocked that this is how people operate.
Note that this is just what people do – this isn’t to say that this is operators manipulating or anything, this is just part of the operations manual for a collection of humans.…
See MoreThis is truly dire, this resolution that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has put together to try and sell her idea of a Green New Deal to the American public. For in what she’s saying she’s actually undermining her own case for tackling climate change. She’s actually insisting upon, with her own numbers, making it all more expensive than it should be, even showing us why we shouldn’t be doing it.
It’s as if she knows nothing at all of the work that’s been done on the economics of climate change.…
See MoreOver in the drifts of the far left where Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the like reside in their democratic socialism there’s the view that Walmart is something that has impoverished the average American. Whereas it’s actually contributed, massively, to the increase in living standards of the average person. To grasp this you need to be able to understand the concept of real wages. Not a terribly difficult one, to be sure, but one that seems to puzzle all too many.…
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