Tag: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

         Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned “a system that allows billionaires to exist“. Her chief of staff tweeted “Every billionaire is a policy mistake.” Pocahontas called billionaires “freeloaders“. Bernie Sanders said “Billionaires’ insatiable greed is having an unbelievably negative impact on the fabric of our country“. The economic illiteracy of such people is staggering. Even the laughable commie economists (oxymoron) of the old USSR understood that new millionaires were vital to economic success.

      In a market economy, one becomes rich only by creating a product or service voluntarily purchased by sovereign consumers. The more people helped, the greater the wealth. Sam Walton, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos became billionaires by improving the lives of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of people. Newly created wealth is the best metric for gauging how well a society is innovating and serving the needs of its people. A society with no new wealth creation is stagnating.

        Many who well understand that wealth creators are vital to America’s prosperity, nonetheless believe inherited wealth is evil. They are wrong; however, we leave that issue for another day. We do note however that almost all great wealth is dissipated within three generations due to the ever-increasing number of heirs, estate taxes, charitable bequests and poor decision making. Also, much of the motivation of the original wealth creators was to provide financial security for future generations.

        Not only is the latte left dead wrong about wealth creation, its positions on many other economic issues – tax rates, minimum wage, free college, Medicare for all and rent control – are voodoo economics and nothing short of modern day witchcraft.

Income tax rates/minimum wage: These were subjects of full postings on March 3 and 10 respectively and are available on our website: www.mllg.us. In those posts, we showed that higher tax rates do not result in more tax revenue and that minimum wages are insidious and harmful, especially to the people they purport to help.

Free college: Social science degrees from overcrowded schools, with courses taught by graduate assistants, are cruel hoaxes. The inevitable result is a surfeit of psychology, sociology and hyphenated-studies majors driving for Uber. Free college devalues all college degrees and the added competition from more degrees suppresses wages. There will be more degreed people seeking the same number of jobs requiring degrees.

Rent Control: Government creates housing shortages by restricting development and then compounds it by enacting rent control. They blame landlords when the problem is due entirely to government failures. Ultimately, it leads to more homelessness.

Medicare for all: The bill Democrats introduced in Congress provides for rationing and reinstitutes the dreaded Obamacare death panels. Even the Canadian system, which is better than many, is a failure; see our July 22, 2018 post entitled “Canadians Flock to Whitefish“. In Canada, the median wait time between referral and treatment is 21 weeks and years in some provinces. Over one million Canadians (3%) are on wait lists when same day service is inexpensive and readily available in the USA.

        Progressives prefer to attack the wealthy rather than to improve the lot of the poor; they care more about appearances, class warfare and political talking points than about results; it is much easier to demagogue billionaires than it is to reduce poverty. Instead of billionaires being policy mistakes, good economic policy fosters creation of more billionaires. Most Americans don’t resent success, they want to achieve it!