If you think the GOP is terrified of my politics now, just wait until they find out about public libraries.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 5, 2018
Oh no, libraries are socialist. How can they be allowed to exist? Republicans must be out destroying libraries.
Or not.
A conservative with a good education in the Founding Fathers would know that Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Libraries, along with fire departments, police forces, public schools, the military are publicly funded institutions that provide a common public service. No Republican is arguing that we need to do away with the police and have people just sign up for private security.
Conservatives agree that an educated populace is necessary for a proper functioning democracy (and please don’t democracy vs. republic thing at me, it’s semantic red herring as far as people voting is concerned. Libraries and schools provide that education.
What annoys Conservatives is when schools become money wasting bureaucratic institutions can’t graduate students with any proficiency in math but can organize teachers protests to demand more money for the bureaucracy.
Conservatives had problems with libraries that become de facto homeless shelters where drug addicts go to watch porn on public computers.
A good public institution benefits tax payers that fund it. It is my fundamental belief that the primary beneficiary of goverment spending should be to the people that pay for the program.
My local library should be a place where I can take my kid to work on a book report for school, not a place for bed bug infested vagrants to masturbate.
Socialism turns everything into a place for for bed bug infested vagrants because of redistribute policy.
Part of Ocasio-Cortez’s platform in a guaranteed jobs program.
So what does a program like that do with people who have no skills and don’t want to work? That never gets explained. Does that program pay a guy $15/hr to stand around with a broom in his hand, scratching his ass? Can someone be fired from a guaranteed job? Can their pay be docked? What if they don’t show up?
Are my taxes going to increase so that some guy who currently provides no useful service in the private sector can provide no useful service in the public sector? Probably, if she and the other Left-sliding Democrats get their way.
This young socialist wants fair housing prices. The reality is that housing in NYC is so expensive BECAUSE of Liberal government intervention, from obscene property taxes, to restrictions on development, to rent control, to unbelievably expensive union construction costs.
When the government says “rent must be X” but the cost of building and maintaining that property costs more than “X” it’s not going to get built.
Pulling the “Libraries are socialist because they are paid for with tax dollars” is duplicitous horseshit. “Public roads are socialist” is even worse.
I want libraries and I want public roads. What I don’t want is to pay a 50% income tax rate so a bunch of lazy assholes can get $15/hr to stand around and never build the road because they have guaranteed jobs and benefits from some self serving bureaucracy.
Eventually, bleeding the tax paying public to death with these kinds of programs means that there is no money left for libraries or anything else.
America has great libraries and roads. Cuba has neither.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should avail herself of the portions of her public library not devoted to Marx, Engels and Mussolini and check out some history, economics, and writings of Cuban exiles. She should also look up the life of the great socialist who singlehandedly was responsible for incubating the vast American public library system, Andrew Carnegie.
I suspect she knows exactly what effects Socialism has, and is banking on getting all the perks- nice dacha, access to the good stores, power to have enemies silenced and arrested, and so on.
True, but if she follows up by studying Lenin, Stalin, Castro, et. al. she’ll find out that the first revolutionaries don’t last very long after the revolution is over. They become threats to the new regime and are dealt with accordingly.
Oh, but this time it will be different!
Few socialists expect to follow in the footsteps of Trotsky.
Every time I see that “roads are socialist” line, I remind the person using it that I pay for the roads. I paid to have them constructed, I pay every time I purchase a gallon of fuel, and I pay every year when I submit my real estate taxes. I pay for the roads when I purchase groceries, or a box shows up from Amazon.
That “socialist” road is actually capitalism in full display. A free market economy drives the funding for the construction, management, and rehabilitation of those roads. Yeah, it may be via a tax system, but it is directly in proportion to the use.
And, when you break that link between use and payment, you get the California situation. They gave benefits to hybrids and electric cars that incentivized people to use less fuel. Then when fuel revenue dropped, they could not afford to maintain the roads. So, now they are looking at taxing according to mileage driven.
Yes, that was my answer when I heard “You didn’t build that”. Oh yes we did. All those of us who work for the private sector — and ONLY those — built everything in the country.
I will continue to argue the democracy vs republic because it IS an important distinction. Words matter and we cannot allow the enemies of our republic to continue to control the language and the terms of its use.
Yes, we live in a Republic. We have a Constitution which limits the powers of the government.
When people make an appeal to majority rules when the majority opinion is against a Constitutional limitation, then it is important to point out we are a Republic.
When people use the term democracy in a sentence like “an educated electorate is vital in a functioning democracy.” And someone else chimes in “We’re not a democracy, we’re a Republic.” That is usually followed up with some variant of “your point is invalid and your are an idiot.”
It is the grammar Nazi argument, i.e., you made a grammatical error so your entire argument is invalid.