By Katherine Timpf
Thursday, August 30, 2018
On Wednesday, it was reported that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
campaign had spent $4,000 on Uber rides — despite the fact that the
self-described Democratic socialist herself had previously decried the company
on Twitter.
This is, of course, nothing short of hypocrisy. If you
really thought a company was so bad, you’d probably make sure your campaign
didn’t use it. If you really thought something was a problem, you probably
wouldn’t give that problem $4,000. What’s more, if you were really concerned
about the plight of NYC taxi drivers, you might, you know, give them some
business, instead of giving your business to the very company you’d criticized
for ruining them.
What we have with this revelation is just another example
of how Ocasio-Cortez’s time in the spotlight has made an argument against
socialism, instead of for it. Her words
may say that the heavily regulated taxi companies are better, but her actions say that she prefers Uber — a
service that is only possible because of the thing she stands most opposed to:
capitalism.
Now, this is not the first time that something like this
has happened. As Investor’s Business
Daily notes, Ocasio-Cortez seemed to make an argument against herself again
last week when she expressed her sadness over the closing of a restaurant where
she used to work. In her post about the good times that she’d had there, she
failed to mention that the reason it was closing was because it could not
comply with New York City’s soon-to-be-implemented $15 per hour minimum wage.
Perhaps unknowingly, she had expressed regret over something that had been
caused by the very sort of policy she supports.
Then there is, of course, the repeated and complete
breakdown of her positions whenever they are evaluated through the lens of
reality and facts. On August 7, she stated flatly that the “upper-middle class
does not exist anymore in America” — undoubtedly an argument for a
socialist-style redistribution of wealth — when the reality is that the
upper-middle class has actually grown under our capitalist system in the last
few decades. The very next day, she claimed that “Medicare for all is actually
much more, is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right
now,” when the reality is that her plan would actually “raise government
expenditures by $32.6 trillion over 10 years,” according to a fact check of her
comments by the Washington Post.
What’s more, her recent interview with Trevor Noah proved that many of her
positions come from a foundation of a complete misunderstanding of the facts.
As my colleague Charles Cooke notes, that interview “revealed that she does not
know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the
recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the
military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800
million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage,
launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about ‘private equity’ firms
that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park.”
Many people might be tempted to see the rise of
Ocasio-Cortez, and particularly her popularity in the media, to be some sort of
sign that her version of socialism might actually be viable in this country.
Anyone who is actually paying attention, however, would see that the opposite is
true. At almost every turn, the spotlight on Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist ideals
has shown how completely infeasible they are, and how often they are rooted in
false information and misunderstanding.
No one should know this better than Ocasio-Cortez herself.
After all, if you look at her actions instead of her words, it seems that even
she herself understands the benefits of capitalism — and her campaign has the
Uber bill to prove it.
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