The premise of the WSJ op-ed by Allysia Finley is that AOC’s economic ideas are wild-eyed — and that the right answer is whatever the paper’s preferred theory happens to be. The piece does the usual thing the Journal does with progressive policy ideas: it dismisses the proposal as unserious, leaves out the working alternative, and hopes the reader doesn’t notice.
I’m not here to defend AOC’s every line. She is a congresswoman with strong opinions, some of which are right, some of which are messy. But the question the Journal avoids is the one I always ask: if this proposal is so crazy, what is the less-crazy version that the Journal actually wants to build?
The piece does not say. It never does.
The Journal’s move is a familiar one: take a policy that would actually redistribute some share of the gains from the top, dismiss it as radical, and then defend the existing arrangement as if the existing arrangement were a law of nature. But the existing arrangement is not a law of nature. It is a set of choices, and those choices produced the inequality the op-ed doesn’t want to talk about. Productivity has roughly doubled since the 1970s. The typical paycheck has barely moved. That gap didn’t fall out of the sky. Somebody has been catching the difference, and the Journal’s preferred answer is to defend the arrangement that caught it.
I concede that taxing the rich is not a magic wand. That the specific policy details matter. That a proposal can be poorly designed and still contain a kernel of something worth building. But the Journal’s reflex is not to improve the proposal; it is to dismiss it, defend the status quo, and pretend that the status quo is not itself a policy choice that benefits the comfortable.
The analogy that should be in every op-ed like this one is the Nordic model. Denmark taxes at 45% of GDP. Sweden at 41%. Norway at 40%. All of them have open markets, private ownership, and competitive business. None of them have gulags. All of them have universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and public universities that function like well-run infrastructure. The Journal calls this “socialism.” The Danes call it Tuesday.
The real question is not whether AOC’s proposal is perfect. The real question is whether we are willing to build the institutional infrastructure — cooperatives, sectoral bargaining, public banking, universal family benefits — that makes a more equitable economy function in practice. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit showed that cash transfers to families cut child poverty by 46% in a single year. When the program lapsed, poverty bounced right back. The arithmetic is not complicated. The politics are.
The Journal’s piece is not wrong because it disagrees with AOC. It is wrong because it refuses to build anything on the ground where it demolished her proposal. It is wrong because it defends the status quo as if the status quo is not a choice. It is wrong because the 300-to-1 pay ratio, the private-equity playbook, the housing-as-asset-class economy, and the healthcare extraction machine are all choices, and the Journal’s preferred answer is to leave every one of them intact.