You Didn’t Earn That: AOC’s Unintentional Confession

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

‘You can’t earn a billion dollars, you just can’t earn that,” the self-professed democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, insisted earlier this week. “You can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth that — since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.”

 

Properly understood, this is a confession. It is, of course, patently untrue that one “can’t earn a billion dollars” in the United States, because around 1,000 people have done it. Some of those people — Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, and LeBron James, to name a few — are in sports. Some, such as Steven Spielberg, Taylor Swift, and Jay-Z, are in entertainment. Many, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Palmer Luckey, are in business. All of those people “earned” their billion dollars and did so by providing something — athletics, movies, cars, music, technology — that people wanted to buy. That isn’t a “myth”; it’s as close to a stone-cold fact as exists in our economy. What Ocasio-Cortez means when she disputes it — what she is confessing — is that she can’t earn a billion dollars.

 

And, indeed, she cannot, because, to put it bluntly, she is useless. I have never understood why AOC’s critics like to razz her for having been a bartender. There is nothing at all wrong with being a bartender. Bartenders are useful. Bartenders supply a service that is in demand and, at the high end at least, are able to do things that most people cannot. The problem with AOC is that she is a socialist politician, and socialist politicians are to a dynamic economy as rice is to a garbage disposal. Were all the bartenders to disappear in a puff of smoke tomorrow evening, the United States would be a considerably worse place. Were all the socialist politicians to disappear, we would have occasion for the mother of all celebrations.

 

John Steinbeck once lamented that, even during the 1930s, Americans were “not very interested in socialism.” “The trouble,” Steinbeck said, “was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians; everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” Well, I think that is marvelous. There are all manner of profound economic problems with the anti-billionaire sentiments in which figures such as Ocasio-Cortez like to trade, but just as alarming is what such ideas would do culturally if they were to be adopted into the American mainstream. America is, and ought to be, a place for strivers. Most of the rest of the world is not. Britain, where I was born, used to be a place for strivers, but thanks to the proliferation of the sort of claims that are peddled by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, it is now a place for mediocrity, resentment, and sclerosis. In my estimation, it is imperative that young people grow up wanting to be like Michael Jordan or Taylor Swift or Steve Jobs — not only because such aspirations are how we get the next Michael Jordan or Taylor Swift or Steve Jobs, but because a culture that broadly appreciates achievement is a culture that will get more of it.

 

In practice, to tell someone that they “can’t earn a billion dollars” is the same as telling someone that they can’t do the thing that would make them a billion dollars. When Ocasio-Cortez said as much, her ridiculous interlocutor concurred as if it were the most obvious truism that had ever been uttered. But I suspect that AOC’s declaration would have landed a little differently if, instead of abstracting her argument away into its consequences, she had focused on the substance. Had she said, “You can’t become the greatest basketball player of all time, you just can’t do that,” or “You can’t write a series of hit songs, you just can’t do that,” or “You can’t spend decades producing beloved films, you just can’t do that,” or “You can’t create an online bookstore that becomes the world’s largest internet shopping center, you just can’t do that,” she might have raised an eyebrow. Because, quite clearly, you can do those things in America — and, more to the point, if you can do them, you bloody well should.