The idea of a representative republic is that a larger group of people will place more power in the hands of their representative than a smaller group will be able to do. So, my Representative in Congress should have more power than say, a Representative from a small district in say, New York City. But to really have power, your political party must have control of the total representative body, which my party doesn’t have at this time. Hopefully that will be changing soon.
Intellectuals on the order of Dr. Victor Davis Hanson and my friend, Ronald R. Cherry M.D. often write about Marxism and its need to bring about conflict, often between classes defined as the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. I must plead ignorance today. Marxism wasn’t a major topic in high school history or university political science as I recall, or perhaps I should have paid closer attention. But here is how I understand it.
The Bourgeoisie are today’s middle and upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with the Proletariat. The Proletariat are the workers and the Bourgeoisie are the business owners. The Bourgeoisie in its original sense was linked to the existence of cities. The city dwellers considered themselves superior to the rural folk. Today’s city dwellers are actually made up of aristocrats, upper middle class and the working/non-working poor. The entertainment industry, the arts and the media are all attracted to the aristocrats. They just like the life style of the aristocrats and hope some of it will rub off on them. The more traditional middle class has moved to the suburbs just to get away from the liberal chaos.
In Marxist philosophy, the Bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production and most of the property or capital. This is the term Rich in the old Robin Hood slang of “take from the Rich and Give to the Poor.” Today, some of the top level of the Bourgeoisie are Big Tech entrepreneurs who have taken the risks to bring innovation to industries and the economy. Some have become ultra-rich and are attempting to use their accumulated capital to gain influence with the ruling class who they hope to join. But they are essentially new aristocrats, the new money guild. One such entrepreneur used his massive fortune to assist in voter manipulation in the state of Georgia. Another squelched a legitimate report on the corruption of then candidate Biden and his family. A third became the richest of all and used his captured newspaper to attack conservatives and to publish far-left opinion pieces disguised as news. Their goal may be to accelerate Globalization. The actual Globalists consider them to be their “useful idiots.” But they have others. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is one of those.
AOC is among the first female members of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to serve in Congress. She advocates a progressive platform that includes Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, the Green New Deal, abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, free public college, and trade school, and a 70% marginal tax rate for income above $10 million. This is Socialism. The State provides everything by taking from the have’s and giving to the have-not’s based on the needs of the latter. But AOC is actually a Communist promoting Socialism as a first step to the final goal of absolute power. She has no experience outside the big city but that has not kept her from becoming the de facto leader of the Progressive movement. She thinks she is representing the underdog and that her policies will bring prosperity to the masses through her brand of Progressive Socialism. She is dead wrong.
Socialism cannot bring prosperity because it destroys the market functions of private property. Under Socialism, private ownership of the means of production no longer exists, and thus there are no market prices for capital goods available. Institutionally, Socialism consists in abolishing the market economy and replacing it with a centrally-planned economy. By doing away with private ownership of the means of production, one wipes-out market information and valuation. Even if the Socialist administration puts price tags on the Nation’s consumer goods, and the people may own some consumer goods, there is no economic orientation about the relative scarcity of capital goods. Most capital goods have to be manufactured locally or manufactured and shipped from the manufacturer to the wholesaler. Some of the manufacturers and shippers may even be competitive nations. For Just-In-Time to succeed, a high performing reliable supply chain is essential. It is a simple principle of business economics not taught at leftist colleges and universities. In fact, the academics dismissed JIT and Quality Control as unnecessary and yielded those concepts to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China. Now those countries are making maximum use of these originally American ideas.
Many supporters of Socialism suppose that business management is nothing more than a kind of registration or simple bookkeeping. They think government central planning would be better. This may be what they teach at AOC’s alma mater. She attended Boston University and graduated cum laude in 2011. At the university she majored in international relations and economics.
Socialists promote science only if it supports their position. They say they support small business and the entrepreneur, but they actuall implement policies that stifle both. The ruling regime may spend heavily on leftist indoctrination by controlling education but when there is no entrepreneurial economy, the people will remain poor. (Venezuela is a prime example.) Now we are discussing actual entrepreneurs here, not Big Tech oligarchs. Big Tech made their money, now they want power. So does AOC.
Between the Big Tech oligarchs and AOC, it is difficult to assess which is the biggest danger to the original idea of America.