On Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” host Andrew Klavan discusses Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt to defend socialism following President Trump’s denunciation of the ideology during the State of the Union Address. Transcript and video below.
AOC was talking about socialism again. She’s on with Chris Matthews, and I love this exchange:
Matthews: “What did you make of the, I thought, pretty aggressive statement about Venezuela tonight? He talked about being a socialist country and how we’re never going to be a socialist country, it was pretty truculent, but it tied the notion of socialism to that particular regime. What do you think about the president, why he did that?”
Ocasio-Cortez: “Well, I think that he needs to do it because he feels like he feels himself losing on the issues. Every single policy proposal that we have adopted and presented to the American public has been overwhelmingly popular, even some with a majority of Republican voters supporting what we’re talking about. When we talked about a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over ten million dollars, 60% of Americans approve it. Seventy percent of Americans believe in an improved and expanded Medicare-for-all. A very large amount of Americans believe that we need to do something about climate change and that it is an existential threat to ourselves and to our children. And so I think he sees himself losing on the issues, he sees himself losing on the wall on the southern border, and he needs to grasp at an ad hominem attack.”
So first of all, I love this “that’s an ad hominem attack on socialism.” I mean the woman’s a Latina, you think she should be able to speak Latin, or maybe that’s not what that means. An “ad hominem attack” is when you attack a person instead of his philosophy, it’s when you say “oh you’re a racist” instead of saying “no, you’re wrong because of this, this, and this.” It’s an attack on a man. But she’s saying his attack is an attack on socialism, as a philosophy. We are a free country, socialism is a government takeover of the means of production. One of the things about socialism that is confusing for people, and it’s the reason Ocasio-Cortez can get away with the garbage she’s talking about, is socialism has changed. You know how, when you’re a leftist, you never have to say you’re sorry? You just change, you now say like, “Oh women should be able to sleep with anybody they want just like men!” And when that doesn’t work out, it’s like you suddenly say, “why are men taking advantage of women all the time?” You just change your position to the conservative position without ever saying that conservatives were talking like that all the time.
Socialism used to be that the government owned the means of production, but when it turned out that that, of course, destroyed countries because it meant there was no innovation, there was no competition. When has government ever done anything better than the private sector? Never. It never has. So socialism has now changed where you get to keep the means of production, but when you make a profit, they steal your money, so that’s a different thing, it’s a different thing than what Marx started out with. They know that when you take over the means of production, you don’t make any money, so they let you keep the means of production, but then they steal the money that you’ve made and they spread it around to buy votes with programs that don’t work.
That destroys countries much, much slower, because what it destroys is your incentive to work. You work to make money, you work to improve your condition and they just take that right away from you by saying “no no, we know how to spend your money, you earned it but we know how to spend it.” And when AOC says that people like the things that she’s proposing like Medicare-for-all, I want to see a poll that says, “Do you approve of Medicare-for-all?” And then you get that number and then “do you know what Medicare-for-all is?” Because nobody does, and once they find out that it’s just socialized medicine, they don’t like it, and once they find out that when you tax billionaires seventy, eighty, ninety percent, they leave the country and take their jobs and take their businesses with them — they don’t like that so much, either. So people like these things in ignorance, they like the way they sound, they like the sound of free stuff, but free stuff is very, very expensive and they don’t like it when it shows up. Anyway, I just love the “ad hominem attack on socialism.”