Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

For an individual supposedly sporting a bachelor’s degree in economics and “international relations” (whatever the hell that is), Congressional wannabe and Democratic Socialist wunderkind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to know very little about either. Asked about economics, for example, the crazy-eyed cutie immediately falls back on the worst kind of Marxo-Keynesian garbage, and, frustrated by her grievous failings in the foreign policy category, throws up her hands and giddily confesses to a total ignorance of the subject.

In some sense, I suppose the poor thing can’t be blamed, entirely, for her tragicomic shortcomings. Like nearly every leftist (like Karl Marx, himself, in fact), she emerges from a cushy, adequately monied background (ask the average plumber or Caterpillar operator how much he longs for socialism) and is the typical twisted product of America’s northeastern idiot factories, in this case, Boston University. She has spent her entire life hearing how wonderful she is, and has likely never heard a firm and final “no!” to anything she wants.

What puzzles me is that she fails the final test of animal intelligence: she is apparently unable to learn from the experience of others. (I saw a fascinating documentary this week about juvenile Capucin monkeys closely observing their elders using rocks as hammers to crack nuts—tool use in infrahumans!) In Venezuela and North Korea people are starving (and falling back on some pretty horrible last resorts—think about the Donner party) thanks to the economic and political system they struggle under. The U. K. is a sorry collectivist mess. The Soviet Empire collapsed from its own ponderous, unworkable weight. Everybody inn Cuba is driving 50-year-old cars. San Francisco is buried under … shame. Every experimental socialist colony ever established in American history—Brook Farm, Amana, etc., failed miserably. Some that began as socialist wound up making the change to capitalism and survived.

I see here that I have failed to mention somebody enough older to know better by now. Bernie Sanders. There, I mentioned him.

Socialism doesn’t work because it’s disastrously contrary to individual human nature, which evolved over a couple of billion years to advance itself. It’s a bit like asking somebody to breathe carbon monoxide. In fact, it’s exactly like asking somebody to breathe carbon monoxide. And yet the economically undereducated (like little Alexandria, for example) wonder why the experimental subject always dies. People are hard-wired to look out after their own interests. That includes expecting some kind of reward for their efforts, other than the greater glory of the tin-pot state.

Alexandria’s real problem is that she was “educated” by total wastes of space and skin and oxygen fully as ignorant as she is. And second-stringers, at that: if she’d just gone to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or some place like that, she could be truly, stultifyingly ignorant. She would have been vastly better off going to, say, Hillsdale College which would have taught her the real shape of the economic and foreign policy world (although it’s a bit religious for my taste). She would have been better off getting an Associate’s degree from just about any junior college, all of which are immeasurably more honest than the average university.

In a culture of full of catastrophically failing institutions, both houses of the Congress, establishment Republicans, Democrats, the Libertarian Party, most corporations, especially the broadcast and print media, even the Boy Scouts of America, higher education is probably in the worst shape. It has absorbed so much excrement from the politically correct minority—from global warming to identity politics to anti-historical revisionism—that it will probably never recover.

I just heard a Professor Jason Hill of DePaul University assert that the university in general is beyond salvage and should be abolished. I would counter that, at a rapid clip, it is effectively abolishing itself. There is no hope for a nation that gives any respect to the degrees being handed out today like Crackerjack prizes, or to creatures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Charles Schumer, David Hogg, or Maxine Waters, and no hope for the reestablishment of the economic or political truth.

In the words of Alice Cooper, school’s out forever. It looks like we shall have to “provide new guards for our future” erudition.