Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.”
When asked to elaborate she explained that billionaires do not make the products they sell, they employ thousands of people and pay them less than a living wage to make those products.
“Billionaires sit on a couch while thousands of people are paid modern-day slave wages. Billionaires make their money off the backs of undocumented immigrants, minorities, and single mothers who are all literally dying because they can’t afford to live,” she added.
Besides the hyperbole about Billionaire’s work ethics, racism, and sexism, emotionalistic arguments usually employed by people with no rational argumentation, AOC is clearly referencing Marx’s labor theory of value in order to make her point.
AOC like Marx apparently believes that the value of a product is derived by the amount of labor that goes into making it.
This notion has been defunct and abandoned by most economists for hundreds of years. In fact, the reality could be the exact opposite. Low skilled labor usually utilizes capital goods such as machinery, software, and other technologies that are responsible for most of their productivity. Further, the value of a product highly depends on its functionality, design, and other innovations and characteristics created by higher-skilled, highly paid employees.
The question is, however, why is AOC, and others touting Marx’s labor theory of value?
Ayn Rand explained it quite elegantly “People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.”
We can investigate even deeper, and gain some substantial insight from Yaron Brook’s book “Free Market Revolution.”
Even Marx himself did not develop his economic viewpoints because he thought capitalism couldn’t work, instead, he developed anticapitalistic economic theories because he embraced collectivism and as result had deep-seated moral oppositions to capitalism.
This excerpt from The Free Market Revolution explains this beautifully.
I think we can clearly conclude from this that AOC like Marx stubbornly clings to bad economic principles due to her embrace of collectivist morality and anti-profit sentiment.
AOC and her cohorts do not mind one bit being challenged on economic facts and realities of their beliefs. They simply evade and deflect. If we are to defend free-market capitalism effectively, we must not shy away from mounting a moral defense.
