JONATHAN TURLEY: AOC's war on billionaires twists America's birth into a socialist myth
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is fast becoming the greatest fabulist since Aesop.
Recently, Ocasio-Cortez insisted that true billionaires are a capitalist myth since "you can’t earn a billion dollars." However, her greatest work of fiction may be her insistence that the Framers fought against billionaires and would have joined her and other socialists in seeking to eradicate them today.
Bertrand Russell once noted that "there is something feeble and a little contemptible" about those "who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths."
The American left has long peddled such "comfortable myths" as the wealthy "not paying their fair share" of taxes. The top 1% of income earners pay over 40% of federal taxes, and that percentage goes up to 70% for the top 10%.
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However, Ocasio-Cortez has become a liberal Homer for her reputation for spinning collectivist tales. What is impressive is her myth-within-a-myth signature style: "You can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth … you have to create a myth of earning it."
In a discussion at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Ocasio-Cortez gave her revisionist account of the Founders as, surprise, budding anti-capitalists:
"I want to talk about how this is in the heritage of our country, because America was founded … you look at Thomas Jefferson writing to Madison in revolt of British aristocracy. The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist."
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In my recent book, "Rage and the Republic," I discuss the economic philosophy of the Founders in exploring the history and future of this unique republic.
While Ocasio-Cortez references our 250th anniversary, she ignores that it is also the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s "The Wealth of Nations." Smith’s free-market theory was an instant hit with the founding generation. These men had just created the first major Enlightenment Revolution based on a belief in natural rights that came from God, not governments.
Yet, they knew that true individual liberty could not be achieved without economic freedom. Smith’s economic theory was the perfect companion for their political theory.
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The combination of American democratic theories and free-market theories produced the world’s most successful and oldest democracy in history. In "Rage and the Republic," I discuss the threats to this republic, including from figures like Ocasio-Cortez, who spread socialist myths. The book calls for a recommitment to what I call a "liberty-enhancing economy."
That is why this particular myth told by Ocasio-Cortez was so jarring. The Founders were great believers in capitalism and the free market. They were not fighting "the billionaires of their time" over their wealth. Many of the Founders were themselves quite wealthy, including banker Robert Morris Jr., who was known as the "Financier of the Revolution."
Adjusting for inflation and current rates, Morris would be a billionaire today.
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The Founders believed in unleashing everyone’s ability to become a Morris. They fought against the taking or occupation of property by the government. At the very top of their stated purpose for the American Revolution was "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The phrase was virtually ripped from the page of John Locke’s "life, liberty, and property." Locke believed that there was a natural right to property created by what God left "in common" for humanity. Preceding any government, it was a right that belonged to human beings by divine grant. Hardly a roaring endorsement of socialist ideals or, as Zohran Mamdani put it, the "warmth of collectivism."
George Mason relied on Locke for his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Jefferson relied on heavily. Mason wrote of "the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
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Of course, the property reference was changed to happiness in the Declaration, which reflected the more transcendent values of these Enlightenment devotees.
While reduced to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," the original language appeared in the Fifth Amendment and, later, in the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting citizens from being "deprived of life, liberty, or property."
In his 1792 essay "Property," Madison echoed Lockean values in declaring that good government "secures to every man whatever is his own."
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Other early figures, like Chief Justice John Marshall, wrote, "The power to tax is the power to destroy."
The new myth-making on the left is meant to revive what I previously described as "economic factionalism," seeking political power with this type of "eat-the-rich" rhetoric. It is working, as it has throughout history. In California, many are pushing a "billionaires’ tax," while far-left figures like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are pushing for a federal variation.
In states from Washington to Virginia, Democrats are virtually chasing wealthy taxpayers out of blue states with planned millionaire taxes.
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To achieve such radical change, you must first destroy the values upon which this republic was born, convincing people that their fundamental ties to capitalism are as ephemeral as true billionaires.
The greatest irony is that Ocasio-Cortez personifies what the Founders truly wanted to combat. They feared mobocracy and the tyranny of the majority, the arbitrary power that can come from majoritarian abuse.
Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and others are truly not new or particularly interesting additions to the political dialogue. They are the same voices of democratic despotism that Madison and others sought to quell.