Don’t Cry For Me, Westchester County

From The Stream:

This blend of leftist economic populism is what Ocasio-Cortez offers America. (Her mom now reports that Cortez has her eyes on the White House, by the way. Before she has even entered Congress. Echoes of Obama.) She’s not from the economic underclass. Her dad was an architect. He moved their family to Westchester for the sake of better public schools. But that was the seed of Cortez’s rage, as the New York Post reports. She saw that her schools were better than those of her cousins back in the Bronx. And that planted in her at a young age a (guilt-fueled?) rage at inequality.

Imagine that: Better-off families, who pay much higher taxes, getting in return a superior product for their children. That might strike you and me as simply unfortunate, an effect of living in a fallen world with limited resources. We might even condemn the government’s public school monopoly, and call for tuition tax credits that could be used at parochial schools. But it made Cortez a radical, egalitarian statist, on the model of Hugo Chavez. It drove her to work for Ted Kennedy. But toiling for that white male was a bland half measure. She soon joined the farthest left political movement with any visibility in the U.S., the Democratic Socialists of America. Her rage at inequality gave her the script for her rise from part-time bartender to the Democrats’ new Congressional Evita. In her campaign, Cortez showered promises on the voters like cash from a drunken sailor.

• Virtually open borders. Beyond a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, Cortez would dismantle ICE, leaving the U.S. incapable of turning away any of the 147 million adult immigrants whom Gallup report wish to enter the U.S., along with their children.
• Medicare for all. Socialize all medicine in the United States, which would (as in Britain) bring all care down to the lowest common denominator.
• Free tuition for all public colleges and universities. Because not enough kids are wasting four to seven years pursuing degrees in Queer Theory, while skilled trade jobs go begging.
• A federal jobs guarantee. According to her campaign site, the federal government must provide “baseline quality for employments that guarantees a minimum $15 wage (pegged to inflation), full healthcare, and paid child and sick leave for all.”
• Housing as “a human right.” Reports Business Insider, “she wants to extend tax benefits to working- and middle-class homeowners, expand the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, provide housing for the homeless, and permanently fund the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund.” Never mind that the last time the federal government decided to make virtually every American a home-owner, it caused the economic crisis of 2008.
• Laxer law enforcement. Per Business Insider, she favors “legalizing marijuana at the federal level, releasing individuals sentenced for nonviolent drug offenses, ending cash bail, and ‘automatic, independent’ investigations when people are killed by law enforcement officials.” So every time a cop shoots a perp, he gets his own special prosecutor.
• Campaign censorship. Cortez wants to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which guarantees private citizens free speech during political campaigns. You know, the one context where our Founders considered it particularly essential.
• As Business Insider reports, “a carbon-free, 100% renewable energy system and a fully modernized electrical grid in the US by 2035 in an effort to combat climate change.” Because “green energy” is working out so well in brown-out ridden Europe.

(Read more.)

From The Daily Signal:

On the same day that Venezuela’s “democratically” elected socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, whose once-wealthy nation now has citizens foraging for food, announced he was lopping five zeros off the country’s currency to create a “stable financial and monetary system,” Meghan McCain of “The View” was the target of internet-wide condemnation for having stated some obvious truths about collectivism.

During the same week we learned that the democratic socialist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, is accused of massacring hundreds of protesters whose economic futures have been decimated by his economic policies, Soledad O’Brien and writers at outlets ranging from GQ, to BuzzFeed, to the Daily Beast were telling McCain to cool her jets.

In truth, McCain was being far too calm. After all, socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether implemented by a mob or a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity, and a destroyer of individual rights. It’s true that not all socialism ends in the tyranny of Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or Castroism or Ba’athism or Chavezism or the Khmer Rouge—only most of it does. And no, New York primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t intend to set up gulags in Alaska. Most so-called democratic socialists—the qualifier affixed to denote that they live in a democratic system and have no choice but to ask for votes—aren’t consciously or explicitly endorsing violence or tyranny. But when they adopt the term “socialism” and the ideas associated with it, they deserve to be treated with the kind of contempt and derision that all those adopting authoritarian philosophies deserve. (Read more.)

 From the New York Post:

 It’s begun. We’re having a debate over socialism. Not over whether it’s fair to call Democrats socialists. Not over whether socialism has been good for Venezuela or some other faraway, unfortunate country. But no-kidding socialist policies right here in the United States. The press attention to a new study of the costs of Medicare for All, or universal health coverage paid for by the government that goes much further than ObamaCare, is a sign that it is a live issue.

Popularized by the socialist Bernie Sanders, Medicare for All is not just a fringy left-wing talking point anymore. It’s a fringy plank of a growing element of the Democratic Party. A raft of prospective Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed the policy, while about a third of Democratic members of the House have joined a caucus devoted to it. The good news for Sanders & Co. is that, in the wake of the failure of an attempted GOP repeal of ObamaCare, the health care debate is clearly moving left. The bad news is that Medicare for All is still a completely batty, politically unserious idea. The new study of its costs, from the conservative Mercatus Center, concludes that Medicare for All would increase federal spending by almost $33 trillion during the first 10 years. To put it in non-technical terms: That’s a lot. (Read more.)

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