The majority of American Millennials identify as socialist, according to surveys by both Reason-Rupe and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. That’s the bad news. The good news is that just 32 percent of Millennials can define socialism. The frequently-wrong but never-in-doubt freshman Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., may indeed be the voice of her ignorant generation.
Ocasio-Cortez retorted, “Of course not. What we have in mind—and what of my—and my policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.” In fact, her economic proposals bear little resemblance to British and Nordic public policy.
As early as the 1950s, Britain began to privatize its social security and pension programs. By the 1990s, as decades of socialism caused economic growth to stagnate, Sweden followed suit. Neither Sweden nor Norway mandates a minimum wage, and Britain demands a minimum wage well below Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed $15 per hour. Britain and Finland offer a lower corporate tax rate than the United States, and all the nations she names have lower rates than her proposal of 28 percent. None has a health care regime as socialistic as her proposed Medicare-For-All scheme, which constitutes a full federal takeover of health care.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance of economics and foreign affairs typifies her generation. Despite holding expensive degrees in both Economics and International Relations from Boston University, Ocasio-Cortez threw up her hands in exasperation during an interview on Margaret Hoover’s “Firing Line” program, laughing, “I’m not the expert on geopolitics.” Fortunately for her, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king; and among a blithely ignorant generation, the lightly educated activist is congresswoman.
