The economic illiteracy of the left

Anne Rathbone Bradley:
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), made headlines when she revealed that she wouldn’t be able to afford Washington, D.C. rent until her government salary kicks in.

The lack of affordable housing in Washington is no joke, but the predicament also speaks to the young lawmaker’s financial literacy — or lack thereof. The 29-year-old didn’t think to consider something as basic as the relocation expenses of a new job opportunity.

If she doesn’t know how much an apartment costs, how much confidence should taxpayers have in her ability to effectively deliver trillions of dollars in campaign promises?

Ocasio-Cortez has proposed free "Medicare for All," free college tuition, guaranteed federal employment at $15 an hour and free houses for the nation’s poorest. These ideas have been conservatively priced at $40 trillion — twice as much money currently listed on the national debt.

It’s the kind of extremist proposal you’d expect to hear from someone who has never made a budget, never been responsible for a business and payroll and never had taxes deducted from a hard-earned paycheck. It's the kind of proposal you've heard from Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him.

While an undergraduate student at Boston University, Ocasio-Cortez’s coursework in economics apparently didn’t make much of an impression about the power of market enterprise.

The problem with her myriad of “free” giveaways is it’s unbelievably naïve and empirically falsifiable to think the federal government is more cost-efficient than the free market. The first rule of economic thinking is that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." Choices have costs.

Economics helps us understand that it is entrepreneurs, inventors and new ideas propelled by ordinary people that power an economy. She should have learned that at BU.

If you want to see young, successful people who are making a real difference, look at someone who started his or her own business, got his or her foot in the door at a prestigious company or worked for what they achieved.

Most people don’t want to be stuck in a $15-an-hour, guaranteed government job because it stunts their long-term opportunities. The private sector incentivizes hard work and lessons learned, and it pays better than any government position.
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There is more.

Ocasio-Cortez is quickly getting a reputation on the right as an intellectual lightweight who is a fount of ignorance when it comes to economics.  What kind of education did she get in economics?  There are some basics that she just does not appear to grasp.  She and Bernie Sanders would follow the Venezuelan model to poverty for all by punishing accomplishment and theft of assets.

If colleges are not teaching the downside of socialism they are participating in an educational fraud.  It is like a disclosure statement that leaves out the risk factors in an investment.

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