Listening to AOC

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was interviewed by Briahna Gray, of The Intercept, at the 2019 South by Southwest conference, where she made some astonishing remarks.  Two are highly revealing.  The first one tells us a lot about what she knows.  The second one tells us a lot about who she is.

What does AOC know?

At minute 58:56 in the video, AOC explains that if we handle the coming workplace automation correctly, we will enjoy boundless wealth, 

"Our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources. Because now we are approaching infinite resources...Capitalism is based on scarcity, and what happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial. And that is what has happened. We have created artificial scarcity."

To paraphrase the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, AOC’s description of the world we live in “is not good enough to be wrong”.  “Infinite resources”, or anything remotely like that, describes no world human beings have ever inhabited, or are likely ever to inhabit.  Infinite resources, and the idea that capitalism is based on scarcity, are such outlandish concepts, they are strong indicators of AOC’s thinking.

AOC studied economics at Boston University and may have heard this common definition in her Econ 101 class:  economics is the study of how societies allocate scarce resources with alternative uses.  Scarcity is the central organizing concept.  If there were no scarcity, there would be no need to study allocation, in the same way that if there were no diseases, there would be no need to study medicine.

In the same class, or some other class, she may have heard that capitalism is one of several ways societies organize to respond to scarcity.  It is hard to shake the notion that the poor dear failed to fully grasp both concepts, economics and capitalism.  And, in her confusion, she conflates them and concludes that capitalism is “based on scarcity”, an incoherent concept.  From that, it is but a short step to seeing “greedy capitalists” working to create artificial scarcity. 

But, infinite resources, however strange that idea may seem to us, is a natural flower in the Marxist garden.  Marxism begins by taking wealth for granted, and bends its thoughts entirely to redistributing it.  We saw this recently in New York City when our Marxist mayor, Bill de Blasio, in his State of The City address, said,

 “Here’s the truth, brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. Plenty of money in this city.  It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 Marxists, consumed with the problem of redistributing wealth, have little time and energy left for thinking about how to create wealth.  The problem with that, you see, is that people have to consume wealth to live.  Sooner than later, redistributing wealth is not enough, you have to make more of it, or you run out.  The thought that somebody in public office is formulating policy on the theory that “there is plenty more where that came from” should make your blood run cold.

One last point, here.  Around minute 58:00 in the video, AOC says we should be excited about the wealth created by robots because,

“What it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing and investigating in the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in.  Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”

     Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Karl Marx will recognize that scenario.  In his essay, “The German Ideology”, there is a passage where Marx begins, as usual, by criticizing the capitalist mode of production, specifically, the division of labor,

 “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.”

 Ah, but come the revolution,

 “while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

In other words, AOC delivers an early 21^st century update to a mid-19^th century fantasy.  Marx thought a magical socialist society will create unlimited resources that will free us from drudgery.  AOC thinks magical robots will do that for us. 

Therefore, you can be sure of two things:  AOC learned Marxism much better than she learned economics, and Marxist fantasy will work just as well today as it worked in the previous hundred years.  And if that does not make your blood run cold, nothing will.

What kind of person is AOC?

   AOC’s second comment, which actually comes a bit earlier in the video, sheds some light on her personality.

Starting around minute 52:23 AOC delivers her heartfelt conviction that 

“we are capable of so much as a country...so much more than what we’re doing right now...we are capable of all of these things.”  

To illustrate her point she talks about President Kennedy and his mission to the moon,

 “...and the position should be not let’s not do it because we haven’t figure out all the details yet.  How about the goal is let’s figure out all the details because we’ve decided we’re going to the moon and we’re going to get there before the end of the decade...”

 That is an inspiring homily, but then AOC wades into some facts,

    “When Kennedy said we are going to go to the moon by the end of ten years, people thought that he was crazy.  He didn’t have a plan.  So many of the technologies required to get there weren’t even invented yet, but it was taken seriously enough as a mission...”

Let’s unpack this little story. 

     Rocketry was a fast-developing field of science and engineering since the German “V” rockets of World War II. At war’s end, there was a mad scramble for German rocket scientists, and it can be fairly said that the Space Race was a competition between America’s German rocket scientists and Russia’s German rocket scientists.

     In the early years, Russia’s German rocket scientists were winning.  In 1957, they launched into earth orbit the first artificial satellite ever to exist (Sputnik).  In 1961, they launched the first human being (Yuri Gagarin) to ever orbit the earth.  And there were a number of important firsts in between. 

     The Space Race was part of the Cold War, and there was more than a little urgency about it, some might say hysteria.  Shortly after WW II, the U.S. created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and after the Sputnik shock it was re-organized into NASA.  Plans for a manned moon landing were being formulated during the Eisenhower administration.

     After Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, President Kennedy tasked his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, to organize committees of scientists, engineers, and NASA administrators.  JFK called upon politicians from both sides of the aisle.  The technical specialists formulated plans and budgets and assured JFK of the technical feasibility of getting to the moon.  The politicians assured him of total popular and political support.  Indeed, they urged him to do it.

     So, in May, 1961, one month after Gagarin orbited the earth, when President Kennedy proposed to put a man on the moon “before the end of ten years”, this much was patently clear,

• nobody thought he was crazy,
• he certainly had a plan,
• he had broad popular and political support,
• rocketry was an already existing and quickly developing field of science and engineering; and
• he had a massive technical and bureaucratic infrastructure to get the job done.

     Oh, and he also had a massive amount of money to spend.  In 2009, NASA estimated the Apollo program cost $170 Billion in 2005 dollars ($206 Billion in 2016 dollars).  And the NASA budget, in those days, could be expressed as some significant percent (4-5%) of the entire federal budget.

Certainly, there was a lot of work left to do, after the announcement, but here is one thing that absolutely, positively never happened:  JFK did not pull the idea out of his ass and then try to cajole everybody into following along.  Putting a man on the moon was a far more complex enterprise, and far better organized, than AOC closing her eyes, tapping her heels together, and wishing for a “Green New Deal”.

What about AOC’s charming fable of JFK?  To paraphrase the immortal words of Mary McCarthy in her criticism of Lillian Hellman, 

“every word of that story is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” 

So, is AOC a liar? Actually, that is a tougher question than it seems, but AOC is certainly of a type we have seen before.

     During my years as a partisan in the Math Wars (Oh, you have not heard of that war?  That’s because my side lost ignominiously, too bad for American school children), I met some wonderful people, among them University of Rochester Professor Ralph Raimi, of blessed memory.  Cultured and literary, Ralph was the real thing:  a Renaissance Man who held dual appointments in the departments of mathematics and sociology, and he was a charming essayist.  (And yes, he is related to Sam Raimi.  Quite the high achieving family, I’d say.)

Around 1995, Ralph wrote an essay about Isaac Newton's unpublished calculus book (a thing that never existed).  Do not deny yourself the pleasure of reading Ralph, but here is the gist of it.

One day, Ralph was listening, on the radio, to a man complaining that publishing companies, motivated only by profit, stifle ideas that could change the world.  He drives home his point,

 "... and publishers have been making such mistakes ever since one turned down Newton's Calculus on the grounds that nobody needed a new calculus book..."

Ralph was thunderstruck. Like AOC’s JFK fable, not a single word of that man’s story is true.  Ralph deconstructs this wondrously, but it is the moral of the story we want.  Ralph writes,

 “The Expert probably didn't worry too much about whether his story was true or not; he figured it could be true, which was good enough. The story illustrated what to him seemed an important truth: that publishers can make mistakes in judging the value of a new manuscript, and that electronic publishing will help prevent such mistakes from holding up progress. So the story contributes to real truth, as The Expert saw it, and that's the only kind of truth that counts...
 “So, in pursuit of the higher truth, our Expert conjured up a seventeenth century populated by students of "calculus," to whom a publishing industry was evidently supplying a rich choice of textbooks. Within that seventeenth century he conjured up a Calculus written in vain by a Newton whose works, like those of most geniuses, were ignored by practical men. It is hard to pack so much misinformation into a few words, but the Expert did it."

“It is hard to pack so much misinformation into a few words, but the Expert did it.”  As with the “Expert”, so with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Again I ask, is she a liar? 

It sure does look like it, but let’s be fair.  To be a liar, in the classical meaning of that word, AOC would have to be aware of the facts and intentionally choose to tell a story contrary to the facts, probably to gain some unfair advantage over somebody.  I doubt this is the case. 

More likely, like Ralph Raimi’s “Expert”, AOC is simply indifferent to facts.  If she happens to be aware of the facts, and they are helpful to her, she would be happy to use them.  If the facts are against her, she will ignore them.  And, if she is ignorant of the facts, well, she is much to busy to research them.  AOC is on a mission to save the world, and she inhabits a moral plane that rises above mere facts.

How should we feel about that?  To quote the Geena Davis character in the 1986 remake of “The Fly”, when it comes to people who rise above mere facts, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”  https://youtu.be/--hMJPUBwMc  Why?  The great Russian writer, Boris Pasternak explains it.

Early in the movie, “Doctor Zhivago”, based on the eponymous book, Lara is in love with Pasha Antipov, who later becomes the Trotsky figure, Strelnikov.

Komarovsky, the lover of Lara's mother, appears to be a selfish, grasping cad, but turns out to posses some redeeming personal qualities.  Komarovsky insists on meeting Pasha, and the three, Komarovsky, Lara, and Pasha, meet in a restaurant.

Komarovsky sees the radical in Pasha and does not like it.  After Pasha leaves, Komarovsky warns Lara off him, saying,

"There are two kinds of men and only two. And that young man is one kind. He is high-minded. He is pure. He's the kind of man the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises. He is the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women."

Of course, Komarovsky was right, as the rest of the movie tells.

I do not think the world despises AOC, but she is the same “kind of man” as Pasha Antipov.  She is high-minded.  She is pure.  She is deluded about the nature of the world we live in.  And she will breed a lot of unhappiness in a lot of people when her plans crash and burn---the inevitable fate of all plans that rise above facts. 

Marxism rises above facts.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rises above facts.  And, when her delusional plans crash and burn, as they must, so will our lives.  Just ask the people of Venezuela.