The slow march towards the gulags continues, and AOC is beating the drum:
Speaking at the Monday event “Blackout for Human Rights: MLK Now 2020” at Riverside Church in Manhattan, the New York congresswoman said, evoking applause, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.”
If you think that the word “gulag” is overwrought, try a thought experiment. Imagine you have an opportunity to ask AOC some questions. Point out to her that in a free-market system (barring any cronyism with government officials), the billionaire’s wealth is the result of voluntary transactions. People voluntarily buying goods and services he produces, on the belief that they want those goods and services more than they want the dollars they cost. People voluntarily agreeing to labor arrangements with the billionaire.
Now ask the hypothetical AOC how exactly she (and her ilk) would interfere with these voluntary transactions. What would they do? How would they implement it? How would they take whatever portion of the billionaire’s money they feel he should not have? What would they do to him if he resists?
Don’t accept some vague answer. Require specifics. What force—exactly—would she use against the billionaire if he resists. What would she want done to him?
What if lots of us resist, through votes or other means? What if lots of us say that we do not want interference in voluntary transactions, and that we do not want our property forcibly extracted for the sole and exclusive use of others? What would she want done to us? What would she do, or cause to be done, to us?
Answers about “democracy” are a copout. Slavery happened in a democracy—the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act were all the result of “democratic” processes. Just because people vote for things does not make those things good.
Answers about obeying “the law” start to get closer to the truth.
Redistribution requires force. A self-appointed elite interfering in voluntary transactions requires force. Not the protective force that responds when someone’s actual rights have been violated, but the coercive force needed to extract from some to give to others.
Leftism always ends in force and violence. It must.
The left’s core aim is redistribution. Redistribution requires force. If some resist—and they will—then making them comply requires violence and oppression. The only thing keeping AOC from leading us exactly where Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Pot, Guevara, et al went is whatever external impediments lie before her. Rule of law. Institutions. The Constitution. People who will say no and still have the power to resist. Take those things away, and she is no different than her totalitarian forebears.
Violence is the inescapable requirement of leftism.
