Congress’s new crop of socialist representatives who have never owned a business and have absolutely no knowledge of how an economy works could make permanent economic policies that could destroy the productive base of the United States. For example:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s promise to boost federal funding for social programs should not be considered “free stuff,” because they are in fact “public goods,” the New York Democrat said in a Monday tweet.
Ocasio-Cortez, who earlier in the day led a Green New Deal town hall about public housing in the Bronx, said she’s tired of being accused of essentially bribing voters with financial handouts.
“Public education, libraries, & infrastructure policies (which we‘ve had before in America and elsewhere in the world!) are not ‘free stuff,’” she tweeted.
“They are PUBLIC GOODS. And they are worth investing in, protecting, & advancing for all society and future generations. Sincerely, NY-14.”
These services are not free. Someone is paying for them. Public education before 1979 was almost solely a local issue. The same is true of libraries. Consider public libraries:
The first modern public library in the world supported by taxes was the Peterborough Town Library in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was “established in 1833.” This was a small public library. … By 1930, half the American public libraries had been built by Andrew Carnegie.
There many billionaires and multimillionaires who could donate money to support libraries as Carnegie did. The people who use the libraries could pay a fee.
Infrastructure is mostly paid for by the people who use the roads and bridges. It’s always been that way. If you don’t drive, you don’t pay the tax. You do pay a tax indirectly when the costs of transportation are factored into the price of goods.
What AOC and her fellow Communists want is the complete redistribution of wealth. It starts with claims of the need to fix infrastructure but ends with taking money from some people and giving to other people who did not earn it.
It’s a standard ploy. that the Left always uses
In a Washington Times editorial titled “Obama’s Third World America,” this statement caught my eye: “On a campaign fundraising trip to Chicago, Mr. Obama quipped that under the proposed Republican budget plan, ‘we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought — that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure.’ He failed to elaborate on which developing countries he thinks should be models for the United States, but his policies have secured America’s status as part of the declining world.”
These needed expenditures are easily funded by the people who use them. Sadly and typically, monies collected for infrastructure are spent out the back door for wealth redistribution and wars.
If you want to see the reality of Leftist economic policies, visit an Indian reservation. Rousas J. Rushdoony was a missionary to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in a remote area of Nevada. It was his time on the reservation where he deduced correctly that the State “is the giver of all things, the source power, of land, and (having built a reservoir for irrigation here) even of water…. The government hospital delivers the children, and the government army taketh them away, and blessed is the name of the government each Memorial Day and Fourth of July.”
The government’s “management” of the reservation ruined their lives. Rushdoony told about the impact of this process in a prescient article first published in 1954 in Essays on Liberty, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education. As you read it below, note how Rushdoony’s reservation experience has broadened in scope to include a majority of Americans who are now on a much larger reservation.
The reservation Indian is becoming less self-sufficient and more dependent upon what he calls “the Great White Father in Washington.” Instead of freedom, the Indian has government-guaranteed “security.” Instead of individual responsibility, he has a government bureau to handle his personal affairs. There are special laws governing his right to own land and to spend tribal money. Under that system of bondage it would surprise no one to find that many thousands of Indians have remained uneducated, hungry, diseased, and mismanaged. — FROM Wards of the Government
As a missionary to the Indians, I find your warnings underscored by my daily experience. One of the surest consequences of a government of “welfare” and “security” is the rapid decline and death of responsibility and character.
Whatever the pre-reservation Indian was—and his faults were real—he was able to take care of himself and had a character becoming to his culture and religion. He was a responsible person. Today he is far from that. The wretched security he has had, beginning with the food and clothing dole of early years, designed to enforce the reservation system and destroy Indian resistance, has sapped him of character. The average Indian knows that he can gamble and drink away his earnings and still be sure that his house and land will remain his own; and; with his hunting rights, he can always eke out some kind of resistance.
Government men too often hamper and impede the man with initiative and character. This is because their program inevitably must be formulated in terms of the lowest common denominator, the weakest Indian. In addition, the provisions of the government for the “welfare” and “security” of the Indians remove the consequences from their sinning and irresponsibility. The result is a license to irresponsibility, which all the touted government projects cannot counteract.
And I believe the results would be no better for the best hundred or thousand persons selected from any society, after a generation or so of the same kind of “welfare” and “security” government.
There are many men in the Indian Service who are sincerely and earnestly trying to improve the Indian’s welfare. They are, however, faced with this constant dilemma: All their zealous and patient efforts to help the Indian simply tend to become another crutch that the Indian depends on. Those Indians who have become progressive and independent apparently have done so because of personal and religious factors totally unrelated to the government program.