Amazon-Revisited

The Amazon headquarters debacle in New York City has dropped out of the news, but it remains yet another recent example of how the supposed triumphs of socialism never seem to actually benefit the little people who are on the ground in the city/state/country were these supposed triumphs occur. Here's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the Democrats most popular socialist who is lovingly referred to as AOC by the trained hamsters in the media) on the Amazon "triumph" as reported in Time Magazine:

The dispute between the two Democrats lays bare a divide over the plan to offer $2.8 billion in tax breaks for Amazon to establish a major presence in New York City. On one side, old hands like Cuomo; on the other, the newly insurgent, left-leaning wing represented by Ocasio-Cortez.

“Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. The new development would have been in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, near Ocasio-Cortez’s district.

The outspoken freshman Congresswoman was a critic of the deal Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio had brokered with Amazon ...

However, Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter questioned the validity of the jobs figure and pointed to a report that Amazon will pay zero federal income tax in 2018, despite $11 billion in profits.

“$0 for schools. $0 for firefighters. $0 for infrastructure. $0 for research and healthcare,” she tweeted Thursday. “Why should corporations that contribute nothing to the pot be in a position to take billions from the public?”

Okay then. The level of blatant economic and fiscal ignorance expressed in Ocasio-Cortez' statements is breathtaking. Sarah Hoyt unpacks it all in a snarky takedown:

[AOC] thought that Amazon would TAKE MONEY FROM THE PUBLIC. You, know, the money that will now not be made, because there are no jobs to generate wealth for the city. She – like other socialists – thinks wealth exists in some weird state, perhaps suspended against each person’s head, and that by giving a company tax breaks, the city of New York would be harvesting money from each person’s head and giving nothing in return.
Other things revealed by this interlude that are typical latter-day chai-latte socialist: Corporate exploitation.

What corporate exploitation, you ask? Well, apparently, giving people jobs is corporate exploitation. In what way? Well, you see, the company makes money from the work of the people it hires. Therefore it’s not giving them the exact value they produce. Therefore it’s exploiting them.

Rich people are evil. Somehow defeating the richest man in the world is a good thing, regardless of what the battle is, or what the richest man in the world is actually doing. Because… well, because to be the richest man in the world he’s obviously taking more of the share of the fixed economic pie than the rest of us. It’s obvious. If there is only so much wealth in the world, how did he get to be the richest man except by being a villainous thief?

It was this odious socialist belief that enabled Obama to say: “At some point, you’ve made enough money.” Because, of course, if you make more than you need, you’re stealing from others. (By making, I’m sure he meant taking. It’s built into their back brain by Marxism.)

Not paying company taxes is evil. Because all the wealth should be evenly distributed, by your fair and just neighborhood bureaucrat, of course. That goes without saying.

[AOC] and other socialists do not understand that the wealth you “make or create” is your own and that their hand doesn’t belong in your pocket at any time. No. Wealth should be properly distributed by our betters, so no one takes more than their fair share. Except, of course, our betters, who need to be compensated for all their work on our behalf.

They are so incensed at Amazon keeping their greedy little hands out of its pockets they fail to understand that the people who got jobs would have been making money and contributing to New York’s already bloated and overspending budget.

Of course, in the real world, the socialists' dreams and ideas meet reality, which is that thing that doesn’t care what your beliefs are.

More recently, the NY Post reports that as the left celebrated Al Sharpton's "National Action Network" conference, one of the panelists lambasted AOC, the star attendee at the conference:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was ripped as “financially illiterate” Friday for her role in killing the Amazon deal at the same Midtown conference where she was a featured speaker a couple of hours earlier.

“The people campaigning against the Amazon campus are financially illiterate,” Tracy Maitland, president and chief investment officer of Advent Capital Management, said during a panel discussion at the National Action Network conference in Midtown.

Afterwards Maitland told The Post, “This was a disgrace. I partially blame AOC for the loss of Amazon. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. That’s scary. We have to make sure she’s better educated or vote her out of office.”

The Amazon departure was a really bad thing for NYC, but some other locale will benefit at NYC's expense.

But what happens if the socialists take over the governance of the United States in 2020, and AOC's demagoguery becomes the common narrative applied to all large (and then small) businesses across the country—heavy taxation and continuous demonization. You know, social and economic "justice" and all that. That should work out well, shouldn't it? Sorta just like it worked out so well in NYC.