Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have been making headlines on their “Fight Oligarchy” tours throughout the country, drawing large, enthusiastic crowds wherever they have gone. This message has been what one might expect from a tour with that title, given that both are self-proclaimed socialists: the capitalists are robbing everyone else of their birthright, taking all of the wealth for themselves.
Neither Sanders nor AOC are strangers to stirring up crowds and firing up the true believers, and socialists and their fellow travelers have been locked in ever since AOC beat incumbent Joe Crowley in the 2018 Democratic Primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District. When she presented her plans in 2019 for the so-called Green New Deal, the media was there to give it maximum coverage.
While the Mises Institute’s Robert Murphy has thoroughly debunked the Green New Deal here and here, we should remember that this proposal actually seeks to put pretty much the entire US economy under socialist central planning. Despite the Ludwig von Mises critique of socialism that more than 100 years later is still the gold standard for examining the impossibility of a socialist economy, and despite the highly-publicized collapses of socialist economies in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and Asia, there still exists a cadre of influential fanatics that believe that beyond all odds, Bernie Sanders and AOC are the new Keepers of the Secret of Socialism.
I wrote of what I call the “Keeper of the Secret” syndrome in 1999 in which I point out that throughout the 20th century, socialists have believed that if the “right” leader were in place, socialism would be tenable:
For the past century, statists have assured us that socialism can be successful, provided the right leaders are in place. However, if those leaders die before their time, then we are left to struggle until the next “keeper of the secret” appears.
Lenin’s death in 1924, we are told, truncated the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and led to the rule of Josef Stalin, who led true socialism astray. Even before Lenin, some socialists believe that the killing of the Marxist Rosa Luxembourg in Berlin in 1919 kept successful socialism from appearing in Germany. Luxembourg apparently knew the “secret,” but was unable to share it with the rest of us before her murder.
All this leads to Bernie Sanders and AOC. Note that for all of his political life, Sanders has gravitated from the hectoring socialist who supported American political parties tied to the Soviet Union to claiming that what he really wants is a kinder, more gentle form of collectivism (all the while insisting he really didn’t support all of the murder and enslavement that went along with the implementation of communism, even though he spent his honeymoon in 1988 in the USSR and came back with tales of wonder at the greatness of Soviet society). Nonetheless, both Bernie and AOC have a dream: a democratic system in which the voters, through elected representatives, direct the entire US economy through the Green New Deal, which AOC and others have promised will finally bring “high-speed rail” to the US, along with other green-based wonders—and high-paying and “meaningful” jobs in the process.
How is the dynamic duo supposed to make the socialist system work? If the adoring legacy media is to be believed, it is through sheer force of personality and personal charisma. Obviously, AOC has the upper hand here, as she is the more glamorous of the two, and in today’s legacy media world, glamour is enough to make socialism prosper. (See the fawning piece on AOC here in Vanity Fair. Of course, Vanity Fair is also on Bernie’s bandwagon, featuring him in puff pieces, but not giving him the glamorous photo shoots).
The Sanders-AOC tour, which is entitled “Fighting Oligarchy,” provides insight into how they would bring about their democratic socialist paradise. Before huge, enthusiastic crowds in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Los Angeles, both of them denounce billionaires, which has been their standard stump speech for a long time. Early in her first term of office, AOC declared:
Well you didn’t make those widgets, did you? Because you employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you. You didn’t make those widgets, you sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages. And in some cases, (…) real modern-day slavery, depending on where you are in terms of food production. You made that money off the backs of undocumented people, (…) black and brown people being paid under a living wage, (…) single mothers and all these people who are literally dying because they can’t afford to live. And so, no one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.
Sanders, seen in this video, claims that billionaires are responsible for all of the nation’s economic ills, as they hoard wealth and pretty much determine everything else, and with their money, they can essentially buy the political process and indirectly purchase candidates that will push through favorable legislation that will make billionaires even wealthier.
It is clear, then, that both AOC and Sanders believe that the modern capitalist economy is based upon theft in which wealthy people take wealth from everyone else, which is how large amounts of wealth end up in the hands of billionaires. The “solution,” of course, is for the state, which is directed by people like Sanders and AOC, to confiscate most of the property and wealth from billionaires and “give it back” to the people. That would be done through high levels of taxation, regulation, and intimidation.
Both Sanders and AOC seem to assume that goods just appear on store shelves or, if they were produced by someone, the production process really was a form of slavery in which all of the workers were forced to work in substandard conditions and not paid just wages. Either way, all that is needed is for socialists to take over production, pay higher wages, increase tax rates, and make sure that billionaires no longer have an income.
It is doubtful that either Sanders or AOC can articulate any plans beyond what was just described. If one were to ask anyone who took part in the rallies to explain how the two of them are endowed with the ability to determine what should be produced and how it would be done to have a functioning civilization, no doubt one would receive a hostile reply.
But even though neither one can explain in detail how their political schemes would result in a world with less scarcity than exists now and have more available wealth, they still are regarded by elites, the legacy media, and much of the academic community as the new Keepers of the Secret. This time, they will make socialism function according to the wishes of the proletariat.
