AOC's latest is that there being billionaires is not a morally good outcome. Last I checked, the increase in the instances of billionaires in the world has come along with vast net benefits for masses of people - including drastic reductions in global poverty.
The data are all there at ourworldindata.org.
Take the iPhone and iPad, for instance. Someone named Steve Jobs made billions (in net worth, not in mansions and cars and golf courses and hookers and blow and gold coins sitting around in an Olympic-pool-sized vault - but rather, something more like current-value-of-expected-future-revenue-stream, i.e., value-created-over-replacement-level, etc. etc. from the iPhone, iTunes, iPad, etc.) through his serving a vast electronics-hungry market of people worldwide. All the while, global poverty has plummeted, even in the non-iPad-consuming (but perhaps partly iPad-producing...) parts of the world, and someone probably had to end up having some billions of dollars next to their name in the net worth calculations for that to occur. Mises explains all this quite well in his work on the role of the business tycoon in satisfying mass customer demands, i.e., cultivating a specialized skill in spotting and realizing value-added. Rand, of course, perfects the analysis in such a way that Atlas Shrugged provides that much more value-added over and above Human Action -- we're at the very tail end of the distribution here in terms of 20th century political-philosophical acumen . . .
I don't know how much more stupid AOC can get than this. The other day she was saying that the USA was "evolving into fascisuuuuuuum" all the while we have a better example over in China of a more fascism-like environment that serves as a marked contrast to the world's leading light (the good ol' USA, warts and all) which has the moral capital that China lacks to lay claim to being the world's lone superpower for some time to come.
AOC says that she looks about her and does not find "an advanced society." Her idea of an advanced society involves something called demo-ratic socialisuuuuum where billionaires don't exist while poverty is eliminated (if you can believe that shit), but I've yet to year about AOC's proposal for philosophical education for children (and ipso facto the rest of the mentally-competent citizenry?) ASAFP which would be the fastest way to ensuring whatever the most advanced society we can reasonably expect to realize, which along the way means dialectical engagement between competing ideas about the good and the right at the highest levels of give-and-take (Dennett/Rapoport Rules, etc.) (that's one problem with the Academic Loser-Left, it's all take and no give with them, "the selfish cunts"?). Ideally it means all informed citizens do their homework as thoroughly as (e.g.) Rawls and Nozick did, at least on the essentials, so as to engage most effectively with their influential-on-academia treatises? Ideally it means all informed citizens who keep hearing about this Ayn Rand woman know where to look to find good scholarship on Rand.
(Hint: Gregory Salmieri, editor of the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Rand, and not Scumbag Lisa Duggan, author of 'Mean Girl,' is a reputable Rand scholar. Scumbag Duggan responds to pointed inquiries about the level of thoroughness and care in her work with evasions and insults. Also, the only decent critics of Rand these past few decades have been libertarians, e.g., Nozick and Huemer, and even there you find some effective pushback from more Rand-friendly figures like Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen - also reputable Rand scholars who were editors of the first academic publication on Rand's philosophic thought in the 1980s. Also, Sciabarra is a reputable Rand scholar, and the most reputable of all Rand scholars is, of course, Peikoff, by Rand's own attestation. In the ideal, Dennett/Rapoport society, anyone wanting to comment on Rand and be taken seriously will be thoroughly familiar with the themes covered in Peikoff's output and not just the already-devastating material in Rand's output, e.g., "What is Capitalism?", "Man's Rights," "The Comprachicos," "Art and Cognition," "This is John Galt Speaking," "Apollo 11," "Don't Let It Go," "Philosophy: Who Needs It," etc. The Peikoff courses are more like material trying to explain in all necessary painstaking detail the cognitive processes that lead to the skill level involved in penning these and other gripping essays/monologues.)
(Then, induce the principle involved with Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff across all the history of philosophy such that (e.g.) an Aristotle-basher like Bertrand Russell doesn't hold the public's attention in the light of the contributions of a most respected Aristotle scholar like W.D. Ross (Aristotle, 1923; editing the Oxford Translation of Aristotle's work in the early 20th century). In the ideal advanced society AOC has not provided any helpful cues toward, there will be widespread familiarity with the admittedly difficult ideas of Kant and Hegel and their relevance; this includes widespread familiarity with such 'metadata' as where to look for (e.g.) the most thorough or the most cited of Kant or Hegel scholarship. One should be able to distinguish most thorough and most cited; e.g., I found Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995) to be the most thoroughly researched academically published work on Rand at least for a good decade or two - prima facie evidence of this is the thorough use of Peikoff's lecture materials as well as books, something that Scumbag Duggan didn't bother with in the slightest - whereas the Peikoff-friendly academics affiliated with the Ayn Rand Society (a reputable source about Objectivism...) have been loath to reference or discuss Sciabarra's work much. The people and organizations near in orbit to "Objectivist apostate" Dr. David Kelley, or Jimmy Wales' Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy email list in the 1990s and thereabouts were, on the other hand, much interested in discussing Sciabarra's ideas/themes. I'd like to hear from scholars of Rand, and Aristotle, and Hegel and others about Sciabarra's claims about the Aristotelian provenance of dialectics as he understands it ("the art of context-keeping") and his claims - endorsed in all essentials by avid avowed Aristotelians like the Dougs - of Rand's Objectivism being an expert application of Aristotelian-dialectical essentials in the landscape of 20th century thought (with the necessary scale and scope of integration required to compose Atlas Shrugged being Exhibit A). (I would also use as examples of dialectical sensibilities in action Aristotle's sprawling research program and Sciabarra's sprawling bibliographic references.) Why should people in an advanced society expect anything less than care and thoroughness in such research and opinion-forming processes? I find dialectical sensibilities in action to be a rewarding enterprise.)
An advanced society is also a society comprised of people who are aware of the basics of all the major theories and schools of economics (including the Austrians/Mises), and taught to think about those economics ideas in conjunction with possessing a knowledge of the data at ourworldindata.org. The juggernaut that is industrial capitalism has almost wiped out extreme poverty, for a population of people approaching 10 billion, and has implemented at profitable scale the technologies that made (e.g.) the iPhone possible. To borrow a phrase from a Gentle Giant song, is any of this that I'm saying here stuff that Aristotle would discontend? Not the fool AOC, but the sage Aristotle. Would his homework-doing lead him to the conclusion that capitalism is exactly as win-win beneficial as Rand and Mises say, that it's particularly difficult to envision a system that can supersede it (he would at least have metadata-level awareness of what's going on in David Ramsey Steele's From Marx to Mises (1992), an exhaustively-researched 20+ page bibliography study, itself one of the 1300 or so works referenced in Sciabarra's Total Freedom, so it's like condensations of condensations of exhaustive research going into the present-day pro-capitalism case...), and that Rand's "What is Capitalism?" captures the essential here (which is a condensation, into one essay, of the theme of Atlas Shrugged) at least as well as anything out there?
Would Aristotle provide a much more thorough commentary upon the work of Sciabarra and the Dougs than what they've received so far from their academic 'peers'? I mean, are they basically right about Rand's being a rightful heir to the venerable Aristotelian tradition or not? Or do her polemics leave enough to be desired (e.g. not showing the slightest familiarity with Kant's quandary in the Antinomy of Pure Reason before pronouncing him an evil evader? that sort of thing?) that she falls short of the standards of perfection in dialectic and other conduct that Aristotle tried to exemplify? I mean, he did say of Plato's theory of Forms/Ideas, 'farewell to such tarradiddle; they are mere sounds without sense,' but at least his rebuttal to the Ideas was explained in detail; Rand never went into detailed polemics against her philosophical 'enemies.' I guess she comes closest to any such thing in her essay "Causality vs. 'Duty'" inasmuch as it comes into direct conflict with Kant's ideas about specifically moral motivation (that it must be done for duty's sake - that there is something irreducibly autonomous about why we are motivated by moral considerations; it doesn't come down to a calculation of interests or the 'virtue of prudence' but rather assigns an inherent dignity to humanity as such as an end in itself . . . the other aspect of Kant that Rand really never touches upon but which actually best explains his profound influence on mainstream moral philosophizing). Without coming to grips with Kant's Antinomy and with Kant's project being in great part a response to what he regarded as the Rationalists' (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) pretense to knowledge of supersensible realities - which contextualizes his talk of "denying knowledge to make room for faith" - Rand's attack on Kant's foundational appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy isn't particularly helpful. (Wouldn't we find a suitably 'Aristotelianized' Hegel more insightful in regard to this and other pesky dualisms?) Her brief polemical attack on Nietzsche in 1961 ("For the New Intellectual" - an essay that is less than utterly fabulous in its entirety, due to the brief polemical attacks) belies her own early Nietzsche influence and even her own positive words about Nietzsche in 1968 which would contextually account for the sources of Nietzsche's appeal.
But Rand's deficient polemics aside, when she's talking about her own ideas and theories, and applying her thinking and writing habits to contemporary cultural commentary, how is she not a first-rate figure? I mean, has no one noticed that in the 1960s she had no public-intellectual competition to speak of - that no one was producing anything remotely like the body of theory and observation contained in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967)? I mean, whatever the value-added-over-replacement-level of works like Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), do they exceed overall and in deepest fundamentals what's going on in C:TUI much less Atlas or The Fountainhead?
Would AOC's advanced society involve people often trying to envision what Aristotle might or might not discontend given all the readily available data about political economy, moral theory, and related areas of study? Or is AOC's idea of an advanced society predominantly involve people who are as ignorant, intellectually lazy, one-sided, hubris-filled and annoying (if only because she wields real power, a legalized kind involving a gun, in a nominally free country) as AOC? Do we one-sidedly Chicken Little about the global climate crisis while proposing solutions no consensus of economists could take seriously, while providing no accounting of the pace of technological advancement (in this "not-so-advanced society," see) or - most important of all, as Rand as well as anyone could recognize - the record of humankinds' capacity for problem-solving?
(For example, I am currently in the process of solving or trying to solve how to deliver an incontrovertible, thoroughly researched, one-stop clearing house of a book or series about the eudaimonia/happiness-benefits of a life lived philosophically (and, in the process, discovering the best philosophical paradigm for the organization of life - e.g., is it Aristotelian-style dialectic; or at the least is Aristotelian-style dialectic a better philosophical paradigm or set of organizing principles than, e.g. Marxian dialectical materialism)? Are there dangers in applying a totalizing 'dialectical' paradigm to the formation of society? Dangers only with some strands of totalizing dialectics but only benefits with others, like if a society of full-fledged Aristotelians set itself to the task of optimal problem-solving?)
From what I can tell, the Academic Left qua such doesn't produce thinkers like Aristotle or aspiring Aristotelian(-style dialectician)s ; it produces loyal mouthpieces like AOC (and left to run amok it would produce only such loyal "minds") who like routinely to shit all over the things that made America and distinctively Western civilization great, and then to pretend that the USA is a nascent fascist entity when we have a real and very contrasty example of such an entity right in front of our noses in China, as I like to think Aristotle would affirm. As much as erecting more border barriers might trigger the word "fascism" in AOC's noggin, the wider question being begged is why so many non-white people from around the world would want to gain entry into even a nascently fascist and hateful country. And, a commonsense question in this context given current Beltway events: Can Xi Jinpeng be impeached for anything? Given current and past Beltway examples, wouldn't you probably need an opposition party for that thing, much less a minimally effective one? Seems like only disloyalty to the one, ruling party in China could get one into deep trouble in that context.
So how on earth would this U.S. Representative (NY-14) be so out of it, as to think there are nascent cultural-political forces in the USA that would make us more like the regime in China? How does someone with a degree in International Relations and Economics from Boston University end up being so out of it as to imagine such things? How does someone so out of it get an endorsement from Obama? How does someone so out of it get such a free pass even from the more reasonable and responsible of center-to-left big-govt "liberals" much less the fawning adoration of the far & academic left which unleashed her kind on the polity? I mean, basically, the academic left has as a core idea for an advanced society something euphemistically and kinda dishonestly called "demo-ratic socialism" but once everyone gets their better-living-through-big-government, punish-the-most-able benefits, where do these advanced citizens go from there presumably with all their new free time?
When do they get around to implementing Philosophy for Children for all schools from grade 3 or so onward? Why haven't they already, given that it's a no-brainer and the literature makes it perfectly obvious that kids can consider and reflect on bona fide philosophical material (e.g., the nature of justice, happiness, the soul, God)? What about the whole meaning of life issue? Is that solved by demo-ratic socialism, or should the citizenry be informed of the state of the art research on the topic, which doesn't seem to make reference to capitalism vs. socialism? How about applied aesthetics such as getting kids and the citizenry exposed to the essential canon of classical music (in addition to other essential genre-canons, but this one arguably has priority). Wouldn't there be a closer tie to better living with research into these areas, than with whatever "benefits" supposedly accrue to ordinary folks from a punitively redistributionist fiscal scheme? (Once the billionaires are outlawed, how do they suppose that the next generation of high-tech goods and services would be realized and delivered at the most feasible combination of quality, price and time saved? Do these leftists have any viable and sustainable alternative to point to, besides an economic system that has worked better to alleviate human problems than any other economic system on record?)
AOC is faithfully parroting the Academic Left line. She hasn't really put any careful and thorough thought into any of this stuff, so that leaves us the question: What about the Academic Left itself? What's its excuse? How did it fail to put 2 and 2 together by comparing the history of the world before and after modern industrial capitalism and conclude anything other than that it alleviates misery and solves problems (although it tends to do this in unequal measure across the population, which seems to be the real "problem" for the left)? How does one manage, as does the typical academic leftist, to attribute no credit to capitalism for the problems it solves, while making light only of capitalism's supposed evils - e.g., not crediting capitalism for the dramatic fall in global poverty, but blaming it for climate change (as though there were no connection between these two things, as though it's not the markets-adopting, widespread-absolute-poverty-reducing China with its 1B+ population that is now the world's highest-volume carbon emitter)?
The likes of AOC are where the Academic Left's theoretical rubber hits the political-praxis road. Is it a remotely impressive result? Or should we instead rate these phenomena on a scale of (dis)value describing the exact opposite of impressive - e.g., willfully destructive? Would there be a more perfect example of the willfully destructive run amok than a critical mass of AOC mentalities? Through the usual pressures for ideological purity on the left, wouldn't a critical mass of AOC types end up being indistinguishable from 20th century Red movements? If we replace "AOC types" with "Academic Left types" do we get any more encouraging an answer? Is the Academic Left a perfect fucking idiot? Any more/less so than the genuine 'fascist Right'? As for combating climate change, can we leave this to the reasonable and responsible experts in the sciences of the doable? Past performance tells me that such types are not to be found on the far left; even so much as a loser as Nancy "Keeping out Illegal Border Crossers is Immoral" Peloser recognizes what an obvious epic loser the Green Dream or whatever it is, is. Cutting poverty increases carbon emissions, ceteris paribus. What isn't held equal is population size, technological capital, and human problem-solving capacities.
And so the loser-left's last-gasp effort to destroy capitalism is to destabilize the poverty-reduction effort to "save the planet" while giving no accounting on the other side of the ledger of these other not-held-equal things? The same bunch of leftists who delivered and/or apologized for 20th century socialism - those unaccountable intellectual thugs? They're sure we shouldn't try out nuclear energy or something before diving headlong off the abolish-capitalism cliff? They're sure that they're so on the ball that if(/when?) AI gets sophisticated enough - as superior and sophisticated and advanced as your typical leftist, see - to diagnose (or not) on the basis of systemic features of capitalism, that it'll endorse the far-left abolish-capitalism prescription? Is the Academic Left 100% sure that it's done its homework here, enough to warrant systematically excluding, ignoring, belittling and punishing as many (presumably) intellectually and morally inferior non-academic-leftists as they can? If the Academic Left can't be blamed for spawning an obvious loser like AOC - if she is come kind of anomaly among undergrads unleashed on the public - then what about the Academic Left itself? What successes won't it try to discredit, and what failures won't it excuse? To disambiguate and translate the wording of the post title into a more familiar metaphor: just how sick is this puppy, exactly?
