The level of ignorance required to be a socialist

AEI:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new Democratic darling and self-described democratic socialist, said some odd things in a PBS interview. First, she tried to explain away the current low unemployment rate this way: “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.”

Well, no, not even accounting for political exaggeration. The latest employment numbers are from the June jobs report. They show that only 4.8 percent of employed Americans hold multiple jobs. That’s lower than before the Great Recession and lower than during the 1990s boom. Indeed, that number has been declining for years. As the BLS noted in a 2015 report....
...

Then there was this from Ocasio-Cortez: “Capitalism has not always existed in the world and will not always exist in the world.” Actually, capitalism has pretty much always existed. People have been trading since there was something to trade. “The market economy, contrary to what you might have heard, has existed since the caves,” writes Deirdre McCloskey in “Bourgeois Dignity.”

And if what Ocasio-Cortez means is “modern capitalism” of the sort that took off in the 1800s and that Karl Marx tried to describe — McCloskey prefers to call it “trade-tested progress” or “innovism” — then she needs to grapple with the parabolic improvement it brought in living standards. You know, this chart:

And as for her flippant forecast of capitalism’s eventual demise, what does she see replacing it? Is this one of those “post-capitalism,” “artificial intelligence will replace markets” kind of hot-take things? Since innovation-driven capitalism has created an abundance beyond the imaginings of Marx, perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to replace it with something or other.
This is evidence for my point that you have to be ignorant of history and economics to support socialism.

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