I was highly amused at reading this article: “Poll: 38 percent say Ocasio-Cortez ‘villain’ in New York losing Amazon HQ deal.”
Apparently, New Yorkers are so badly educated that they didn’t understand the side effects of electing socialists.
You see, electing socialists always results in businesses moving away, disappearing, or never setting up in your town at all.
There are reasons for this, reasons usually tied in with how socialists view the world.
For instance, they don’t understand where money/wealth comes from.
It used to be, for old-time Marxists, that money was created by labor. That notion is crazy enough, since you can labor long and hard and not create anything of value. (See, for instance, my 13-year apprenticeship in writing commercially viable fiction.) Or you can do very little labor and create something of great value. (C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles were written in a freakishly short time for many writers.)
But Marxism has come a long way, baby, by becoming the politics of choice of spoiled upper-class darlings who have never done any work in their lives.
To them – judging by my kids’ school books, my leftist colleagues’ vagaries and, yes, Alexandria Occasional Cortex’s eructation – wealth is something that just exists, kind of free-form. It can be stolen and hoarded, but not actually created in any sense of the word.
This is why socialists are convinced that we stole our wealth from the sh**holes of the world. (No, seriously. My kids’ history and geography books all said this.) Also, it’s why poor Occasional Cortex, whom no one ever accused of an overabundance of brains, thought that she was saving the people of New York money by chasing Amazon away.
The dispute between the two Democrats lays bare a divide over the plan to offer $2.8 billion in tax breaks for Amazon to establish a major presence in New York City. On one side, old hands like Cuomo; on the other, the newly insurgent, left-leaning wing represented by Ocasio-Cortez.
“Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. The new development would have been in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, near Ocasio-Cortez’s district.
The outspoken freshman Congresswoman was a critic of the deal Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio had brokered with Amazon.
….. However, Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter questioned the validity of the jobs figure and pointed to a report that Amazon will pay zero federal income tax in 2018, despite $11 billion in profits.
“$0 for schools. $0 for firefighters. $0 for infrastructure. $0 for research and healthcare,” she tweeted Thursday. “Why should corporations that contribute nothing to the pot be in a position to take billions from the public?”
There is a lot more to unpack there, but the important thing here is that Occasional Cortex thought that Amazon would TAKE MONEY FROM THE PUBLIC. You, know, the money that will now not be made, because there are no jobs to generate wealth for the city. She – like other socialists – thinks wealth exists in some weird state, perhaps suspended against each person’s head, and that by giving a company tax break, the city of New York would be harvesting money from each person’s head and giving nothing in return.
Other things revealed by this interlude that are typical latter-day chai-latte socialist: Corporate exploitation.
What corporate exploitation, you ask? Well, apparently, giving people jobs is corporate exploitation. In what way? Well, you see, the company makes money from the work of the people it hires. Therefore it’s not giving them the exact value they produce. Therefore it’s exploiting them.
Rich people are evil. Somehow defeating the richest man in the world is a good thing, regardless of what the battle is, or what the richest man in the world is actually doing. Because… well, because to be the richest man in the world he’s obviously taking more of the share of the fixed economic pie than the rest of us. It’s obvious. If there is only so much wealth in the world, how did he get to be the richest man except by being a villainous thief?
It was this odious socialist belief that enabled Obama to say: “At some point, you’ve made enough money.” Because, of course, if you make more than you need, you’re stealing from others. (By making, I’m sure he meant taking. It’s built into their back brain by Marxism.)
Not paying company taxes is evil. Because all the wealth should be evenly distributed, by your fair and just neighborhood bureaucrat, of course. That goes without saying.
Occasional Cortex and other socialists do not understand that the wealth you “make or create” is your own and that their hand doesn’t belong in your pocket at any time. No. Wealth should be properly distributed by our betters, so no one takes more than their fair share. Except, of course, our betters, who need to be compensated for all their work on our behalf.
They are so incensed at Amazon keeping their greedy little hands out of its pockets they fail to understand that the people who got jobs would have been making money and contributing to New York’s already bloated and overspending budget.
Of course, in the real world, the socialists’ dreams and ideas meet reality, which is that thing that doesn’t care what your beliefs are.
So, the “richest man in the world” shrugs and takes his headquarters elsewhere, leaving the city without jobs and without the money it would have gotten from the company and its employees, and also without the ability to attract more technical jobs and employers.
This is your typical socialist victory. In a country – instead of a city, though in a city too, eventually – it just ends up chasing away not only the rich but also those who have any ability to produce wealth. (Which, in reality, can be produced, instead of accruing at birth.)
In the end, what you’re left with in any socialist jurisdiction is an equality of poverty, while the socialists pat themselves on the back for chasing away all the greedy people.
Some New Yorkers are starting to understand that. Let’s hope more do and soon. n fact, let’s hope all of our nation figures out the lie of socialism without having to try it out.
I really don’t want to live in the Venezuela of the North. I like my pets. I don’t want to know what they taste like with mustard.
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