AOC Trashes Capitalism at SXSW

The socialist’s left darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez maintained her anti-capitalist course during this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin.

During an interview with The Intercept’s political editor Briahna Gray, Ocasio-Cortez went on a rant against capitalism.

When approaching the subject of capitalism, Ocasio-Cortez asserted that the U.S. is reaping the consequences of putting “profits over everything else in our society” and that capitalism as a system is “irredeemable.”

The congresswoman expanded:

“Capitalism is an ideology of capital – the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit…so to me capitalism is irredeemable.”

Interestingly, Ocasio-Cortez went on to criticize the original New Deal. In her view, FDR’s New Deal completely ignored minorities:

“The New Deal was an extremely economically racist policy that drew little red lines around black and brown communities and it invested in white America.”

Ocasio-Cortez continued:

“It allowed white Americans access to home loans that black Americans didn’t have access to, giving them access to the greatest source of intergenerational wealth.”

There is some truth to Ocasio-Cortez’s statements given that the New Deal featured numerous interventionist policies, especially in housing, that favored whites. What is lost upon the Congresswoman is that these policies are not capitalist, but rather they are the textbook definition of interventionist crony capitalism.

Trying to fix previous injustices caused by the government with more government is hacking at the branches at best, and at worst, creates more unintended consequences and impedes the accumulation of capital that minorities desperately need to prosper.

However, Ocasio-Cortez ignores several points about the New Deal’s interventionist policies and their deleterious consequences for minorities. New Deal minimum wage polices cost 500,000 African Americans their jobs, while legislation like the Davis-Bacon Act served the purpose of keeping African American construction workers from working on public projects during the Great Depression.

Government assistance has never benefitted minorities and has only fostered intergenerational government dependency.

Alas, in our current political climate, “quick fix” solutions like socialism seem to be the alternative that many misguided individuals turn to. Little do these naïve souls realize that economic interventionism has unpleasant consequences in the long-term. Countries like Venezuela in the present have front row seats to the devastating societal damage socialist policies inflict upon countries.

The normalization of anti-capitalist discourse in American politics should worry liberty-loving Americans. When socialist figures like Ocasio-Cortez are warmly received at tech conferences filled of countless entrepreneurs who became prosperous through capitalist endeavors, it’s safe to say our political culture is on the decline.

As the late Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.”

Cultural acceptance of socialism is a harbinger of the toxic political damage that will eventually come.

At this point in the game, libertarians can no longer afford to ignore cultural battles.