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Posts Tagged ‘Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’

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Doug Casey: The Democratic Party Is a “Freak Show” – Casey Research

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2019

No, to come up with ideas like hers means that you’re purposefully trying to create a disaster; that’s the definition of an evil person.

You only have to look at John Bolton to know progressives don’t have a on lock on freaks.

https://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/doug-casey-the-democratic-party-is-a-freak-show/

By Doug Casey

Justin’s note: Elizabeth Warren could cost America trillions of dollars.

Warren is, of course, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. She’s also running for president.

And like many fellow Democrats, she’s full of wacky ideas. Most recently, she made waves by saying she wants to forgive more than $1 trillion worth of student loans if she becomes president. She also wants to issue reparations to African Americans, which could also cost trillions.

These sorts of ideas used to be considered extreme. A candidate would get laughed out of the race for suggesting them. But those days are over.

A recent poll found that just 27% of Americans oppose Warren’s debt forgiveness plan. As for reparations? Well, fellow Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris both support the idea.

Of course, not everyone’s a fan of these ideas. Doug Casey is one of those people. Below, Doug tells me why these ideas are not only ridiculous but destructive. He also tells me why he thinks Warren is part of a much bigger problem.

Justin: Doug, what do you make of Elizabeth Warren’s plan to forgive student loans? Surely, student loans are a major problem.

But I’m not sure this is the best solution. What do you think?

Doug: Well, it makes perverse sense that she’d suggest something like this. After all, a new Democratic presidential candidate enters the race every day now. I think we’re up to 22 candidates now. But who’s counting?

They seem to be competing with each other in an actual freak show. The Evil Party is trotting out its most bizarre nomenklatura, each trying to outdo the other in being socialist, black, queer, transgender friendly, or a professional female. By which I mean a female who parades as a female for a living. They’re vying over who has the most outlandish, rabid and nonsensical ideas about how they’re going to transform the very nature of what’s left of the United States.

Meanwhile, the Stupid Party, the right wing of the Demopublicans, populated by neocons, has-beens, and assorted non-entities, seems mainly interested in hyping the stock market with phony money, and looking for a major war somewhere in the world.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) kind of set the tone for all this. It amazes me that a 29-year-old Puerto Rican bartender comes from out of nowhere, apparently as a result of an actual casting call, and now everybody in the country takes her ideas seriously.

Perhaps the most stupid of her ideas is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This basically amounts to unlimited printing of dollars.

All these other candidates have to call her bet, raise it, and wait for the next player to reraise. They all have some signature goofball idea at this point… Read the rest of this entry »

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Well, It’s Clear AOC Hasn’t Read Fritz Machlup

Posted by M. C. on May 17, 2019

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/05/well-its-clear-aoc-hasnt-read-fritz.html

Well, It’s Clear AOC Hasn’t Read Fritz Machlup

In the above video, it is clear that
the socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez understands nothing about capital investment, liquidation and incentives. She has an extremely shallow view of what stock buybacks do and doesn’t understand the importance of stock buybacks as a mechanism by which shareholders can experience capital appreciation which provides incentive for others to invest in the stock market, since they will know that one way profits may be used is to buyback stock to put upward pressure on stocks.

As Fritz Machlup wrote in his 1931 book, The Stock Market, Credit, and Capital Formation:

The rise in security prices in turn gives an impetus to new issues. It’s obvious that the best time for corporations to raise new capital is at a time when the stock market is firm, thus showing at there is likely to be a ready sale for new securities.

Of course, this would also require AOC to understand the value of new issues and the value of raising capital in an economy, which she appears not to understand given her statement/questioning.

On top of all this, there is no indication she understands wage and benefit competition with her comment about healthcare benefits. Not to mention that healthcare benefits developed in the first place because of socialist wage controls during World War II.

The healthcare market was entirely different before that and it didn’t require corporate health benefits any more than it required corporations buying toothbrushes for employees (SEE: How Did We Actually Get Into the Current Healthcare Mess?).

It is stunning the amount of understanding AOC lacks. Even more stunning is that she fails to grasp her failure and proudly retweets the videos which display her lack of understanding.

–RW

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Thanks to AOC: Check Another Box Off on the Attempt to Implement the ‘Communist Manifesto’ in America

Posted by M. C. on May 10, 2019

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/05/thanks-to-aoc-check-another-box-off-on.html

By Robert Wenzel

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation on Thursday to cap credit card interest rates at 15%.

This, of course, will do nothing but block credit for low credit score, high-risk individuals.

AOC understands this. Consider this exchange she had on Twitter.

@NahazDota tweeted to AOC:

Her response:

In other words, she knows the damage it will do. Her real goal is to move toward a government loan granting bank. That’s what her “postal banking” line is all about.

The Washington Post explains this is part of the AOC-Sanders Bill:

 It would also allow the U.S. Postal Service to get into the banking business, including offering savings and checking accounts.

AOC is very shrewd in the advance of the commie agenda. She always frames it in a way the masses will go for: “A cap on credit card interest rates.” But anyone who knows basic economics knows that is bad enough but she is going beyond that with her call for turning the U.S. Postal Service into a bank.

Point 5 in the Communist Manifesto calls for this:

Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of the National Bank with the state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

She knows she can’t nationalize the entire banking system, yet, so she is doing an end-around by attempting to turn the U.S. Postal Service into a bank that in no time will be required to be supported by taxes as the loans made will be unprofitable.

Be seeing you

che-guevara_00427261

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Ocasio-Cortez’s Selective Memory on the New Deal | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 12, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/ocasio-cortezs-selective-memory-new-deal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez never misses the opportunity to bash capitalism.

At the 2019 South by Southwest festival, the Congresswoman derided capitalism, describing it as “irredeemable.” She says that the U.S. is currently facing the consequences of “putting profits over everything else in our society.” Curiously, the freshmen congresswoman pivoted her rant towards a critique of the New Deal.

How could such a staunch leftist like Ocasio-Cortez — who fashioned her pet legislation as the “Green New Deal” — criticize its 20th-century predecessor? She was able to do so by turning this discussion into a matter of race.

In her view, Roosevelt’s New Deal cut African Americans a raw deal:

“The New Deal was an extremely economically racist policy that drew little red lines around black and brown communities and it invested in white America.”

Ocasio-Cortez continued expanding on the New Deal’s harmful effects: “It allowed white Americans access to home loans that black Americans didn’t have access to, giving them access to the greatest source of intergenerational wealth.”

Misinterpreting the New Deal’s Racist History

The congresswoman is correct about the New Deal’s racist policies, albeit from an observational standpoint. I wrote about this previously, detailing how the federal government promoted segregated housing during the New Deal at the African-American community’s expense.

However, Ocasio-Cortez’s talk about the New Deal flagrantly omits other government interventions that clearly affected racial minorities in a negative way. The Wagner Act of 1935 — which established labor-union monopolies — gave incumbent unions tremendous power to exclude low-wage workers. During this period, union heavyweights discriminated against black workers in order to keep wages artificially high for white workers.

Similarly, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 allowed the executive branch to create industrial cartels to restrict output and enact minimum-wage policies. This resulted in approximately 500,000 blacks being pushed out of the labor market thanks to high, non-market wages.

Despite these overlooked aspects of the New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez continues to race hustle and thinks that more government intervention will somehow “correct” past injustices that the government itself created.

How Limited Government Made African Americans Prosperous

In contrast to the New Deal, markets have historically helped racial minorities. It was during the Gilded Age that the African-American community was able to first establish itself as an economic force. This was an era when there was no welfare state, no federal tax maze, nor an alphabet soup of bureaucracy to impede capital accumulation and business creation.

During this time, African American civil society was at its peak. David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to Welfare State was a seminal work in demonstrating how the African-American community thrived without any form of government assistance before the New Deal. Civic organizations like the Independent Order of Saint Luke and the United Order of True Reformers “specialized initially in sickness and burial insurance,” and became leading institutions in African-American civil society.

The Independent Order of Saint Luke stood out for its entrepreneurial endeavors and ended up establishing the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond, which had the honor of having Maggie L. Walker as the first, black female bank president in American history…

Be seeing youmlk

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ocasio-Cortez: Draft ‘All Genders’ for the Military | Breitbart

Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2019

It’s not clear Ocassional-Cortex knows there is no draft in affect at this time.

She leaves out one of my favorite groups – Species Dysphoria A true progressive would say this obviously makes AOC a racist, Russia loving antisemite!

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/05/ocasio-cortez-draft-all-genders-for-the-military/

By Neil Munro

The Pentagon should draft all “genders,” not just men and women, according to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She casually spotlighted her revolutionary rejection of biology, sex, and the male-or-female society during a live Facebook chat in which she was asked about her views on the military draft. “As long as we have a draft, I support people of all genders being drafted,” she said…

Be seeing you

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Capital is a Mystery to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 4, 2019

…the problem in underdeveloped countries is that “most people cannot participate in an expanded market because they do not have access to a legal property rights system that represents their assets in a manner that makes them widely transferable and fungible, that allows them to be encumbered and permits their owners to be held accountable.”

https://mises.org/wire/capital-mystery-alexandria-ocasio-cortez

We all know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is dominating the political news with her demands for socializing the economy. Bob Murphy has explained that her Green New Deal “makes no sense on economic grounds” and even for Keynesians it “ would be nonsensical to implement such a program today.” Given the inanity of the Green New Deal, I would like to propose a course of study for Ocasio-Cortez.

While Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics, she apparently never learned the lessons stressed by Hernando de Soto in his The Mystery of Capital. The country would be better off if AOC and politicians of all stripes understood and took to heart de Soto’s warnings.

“People who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work.” This, according to de Soto, is the mystery of capital.

De Soto argues that “capital, the most essential component of Western economic advance, is the one that has received the least attention” and shows that the major barrier to the production of capital is the lack of private property rights in struggling countries. Socialism, particularly the extreme proposals from Ocasio-Cortez, undermine and in some cases completely eliminate private property. De Soto provides us with a mainly historical argument showing that adopting socialist proposals will destroy the capital producing engine that powers the U.S. economy.

Westerners, de Soto points out, take this capital producing “mechanism so completely for granted that they have lost all awareness of its existence.”

De Soto’s fear is that if we don’t understand the importance of private property in producing the capital necessary for our increasing standards of living then “the West might damage the source of its own strength. Being clear about the source of capital will also prepare the West to protect itself and the rest of the world as soon as the prosperity of the moment yields to the crisis that is sure to come.”

The Green New Deal could be such a crisis…

De Soto focuses on the lack of capital in poorer countries. On this issue, I recommend Mises’ “The Plight of the Underdeveloped Nations.”2 Here, Mises provides us with an excellent analysis of the institutional problems in less developed countries. The countries are underdeveloped because “they had been slow in developing those ideological and institutional conditions which are the indispensable prerequisite of large scale capital accumulation.” What should underdeveloped nations do to “eradicate penury”? “They must resort to laissez faire; they must remove all obstacles fettering the spirit of enterprise and stunting domestic capital accumulation and the inflow of capital from abroad.”

If Ocasio Cortez and other socialists understood the lessons of de Soto and Mises they might be reluctant to support policies that destroy the basis of a thriving economy, private property rights and capital accumulation.

Be seeing you

AOC

 

 

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The Fresh Face of Stalinism – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 28, 2019

Promises of the free stuff never worked, whether in the ancient Rome, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea or Venezuela.

Marxist-Leninist program could “work” only when coupled with the mass murder practiced by the Soviet Union, China, and socialist puppet regimes of the Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/yuri-n-maltsev/the-fresh-face-of-stalinism-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

By

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked political observers after defeating 10-term incumbent Congressman Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th District by nearly 14 points at the 2016 primaries. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez calls Ocasio-Cortez “the future of our party.

The 29-year-old “Democratic socialist” has used her popularity in the mainstream media to move Democratic Party further down to socialism. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran on the same platform as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Her program of the socialist revolution in the United States is named the Green New Deal and uses the threat of the presumed “climate change” as the valid reason for a complete socialist takeover of the U.S. economy. “A Green New Deal will require the following: … providing and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital (including through community grants, public banks, and other public financing), technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization.” It is obvious that the public receiving “appropriate ownership stakes” is an acknowledgement that the government will own the means of production what is socialism. All promises and talking points of the Green New Deal can be found in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union’s “Stalin’s Constitution”. It includes the government-guaranteed medical care, housing, education and the “right to work”. She goes even farther to guarantee jobs for everyone “unable or unwilling to work”. Stalin dealt with the “unwilling” differently, – they would be shot on the spot. Only after his death Soviet socialists “mellowed” and would “only” deport the “unwilling” to the forced labor camps in Siberia….

Be seeing you

Stalin’s Famines and Walter Duranty | Hankering for History

 

 

 

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Greenpeace Co-Founder: ‘Climate Crisis Is Not Only Fake News. It’s Fake Science’ | The Daily Caller

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2019

https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/12/greenpeace-patrick-moore-climate-crisis-fake-news-fake-science/

David Krayden | Ottawa Bureau Chief

Co-founder of environmental organization Greenpeace Patrick Moore said Tuesday that the climate change crisis driving much of liberal politics today “is not only fake news. It’s fake science.”

Moore also wondered during his appearance on “Fox & Friends” why people would be worried about global warming: “A little bit of warming would not be a bad thing, for myself being Canadian.”

Moore bounced back into the climate change debate last week in an online feud with New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after he blasted her Green New Deal for being not ambitious but ridiculous. (RELATED: Report: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Has Violated Her Own Green New Deal)

“Well, it’s a silly plan; that’s why I suggested she was a pompous little twit, twit meaning silly in the British lexicon,” Moore told Fox, adding, “She really rubbed me the wrong way when she said she’s ‘the boss’ because she can make up a proposal that’s completely ridiculous, and nobody else did.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Income Inequality Fair? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/walter-e-williams/is-income-inequality-fair/

By

Some Americans have much higher income and wealth than others. Former President Barack Obama explained, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” An adviser to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has a Twitter account called “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure” tweeted, “My goal for this year is to get a moderator to ask ‘Is it morally appropriate for anyone to be a billionaire?’” Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in calling for a wealth tax, complained, “The rich and powerful are taking so much for themselves and leaving so little for everyone else.”

These people would have an argument if there were piles of money on the ground called income, with billionaires and millionaires surreptitiously getting to those piles first and taking their unfair shares. In that case, corrective public policy would require a redistribution of the income, wherein the ill-gotten gains of the few would be taken and returned to their rightful owners. The same could be said if there were a dealer of dollars who — because of his being a racist, sexist, multinationalist and maybe a Republican — didn’t deal the dollars fairly. If he dealt millions to some and mere crumbs to others, decent public policy would demand a re-dealing of the dollars, or what some call income redistribution.

You say, “Williams, that’s lunacy.” You’re right. Read the rest of this entry »

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Why “climate change deniers” are better for the environment than politicians | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on March 10, 2019

The UN’s Christiana Figueres said: The climate agenda is about destroying capitalism.

Climate change is the McGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock’s name for the reason for the story but not really the story. The uranium filled wine bottle in “Notorious”.

The only thing slated for be changed is you. Being told how to live in a government controlled socialist/communist environment.

Collectively, most of these environmentalists people acted through their privileged group called the Club of Rome. The founding meeting of the Club occurred in 1968 at David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy. In their 1994 book “The First Global Revolution,” they declared:

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

That is right, YOU are the enemy.

Well no, David Rockefeller was and George Soros and David Attenborough are the enemy.

As I have said before I believe the future envisioned by Figueres is predicted by Isaac Asimov’s “Caves of Steel”.

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/why-climate-change-deniers-are-better-for-the-environment-than-politicians/

By Joe Jarvis

Skeptics of human-caused climate change are more environmentally conscious than people who believe climate change is undeniably caused by human action.

A study last year found that climate change skeptics were more likely than the most ardent believers to adjust personal behavior to be more environmentally conscious.

“Belief in climate change predicted support for government policies to combat climate change, but did not generally translate to individual-level, self-reported pro-environmental behavior,” said the paper.

So they want the government to step in and force people to reduce their “carbon footprint,” but they aren’t willing to simply make those changes in their own lives. It’s the selfish attitude, why should I sacrifice if everyone else isn’t going to?

Except that normal people already treat their environment well, even as they are skeptical of how big the crisis really is, and what exactly caused it.

Meanwhile, climate change zealots aren’t doing their fair share to be environmentally conscious.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proves this point.

There are few details about her “Green New Deal,” just general goals like achieving “net-zero” carbon emissions.

But when confronted with easy “green” choices, she simply didn’t care enough to walk the walk. Read the rest of this entry »

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