I’ve got a bone to pick with the so-called progressive Democrats who believe they can remake America in the image of their utopian fantasies.
Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—AOC, the self-styled champion of the working class—who recently called for the “expeditious” rollout of a wealth tax while speaking at the Munich Security Conference.
AOC as president of the United States would be even more disastrous than a wealth tax.
She’s out there preaching redistribution as if it’s a moral imperative—eat the rich, spread it around, build a government-managed paradise where bureaucrats hold the purse strings. But let’s call it what it is: a rerun. A tired, threadbare rerun of a system that has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Everywhere.
It’s collapsing in real time in places like Cuba and Venezuela. It imploded in the Soviet Union despite decades of bravado and five-year plans. The track record isn’t complicated. It’s written in bread lines, blackouts, and boarded-up storefronts.
And I meant what I said yesterday: Cuba is going to fall—and soon.
If you want a real-time case study of what happens when collectivist theory slams into economic reality, look 90 miles off the Florida coast. Marco Rubio laid it out plainly in an interview with Bloomberg while in Munich. Listen:
Everyone claims to be “for the people” until they’re actually in power—which is exactly what happened in Cuba.
Cuba is teetering on the brink. No fuel. No tourists. No cash. The country is grinding to a halt. Just this week, officials suspended their annual cigar festival because of a crippling energy crisis sparked by dwindling oil supplies.
Oil imports from Venezuela—long a lifeline—dried up after Washington toppled that socialist regime last month. Blackouts are routine. Food shortages are widespread. The United Nations is warning of a potential humanitarian “collapse.” Fuel is rationed. Electricity is cut for hours at a time. Tourism revenue, once a critical source of hard currency, has evaporated.
Thousands are fleeing—some 5,000 Cubans taking to the seas or crossing borders in desperate bids for survival. Mexico is reportedly sending humanitarian aid ships just to help keep the lights on.
This isn’t abstract theory. It’s the death rattle of a communist experiment suffocating under its own weight. And Rubio argues it will continue until Cubans are granted true economic freedom.
Government handouts are nothing more than a noose around the neck of the poor, waiting to be tightened when the government sees fit.
Cuba’s leaders believed central planning could outmaneuver reality. Reality won.
The island now faces one of its worst socio-economic crises in decades, forcing even reluctant conversations with the United States. If this is the model AOC and her allies envision for America, they’re welcome to test it somewhere else.
And Cuba is hardly alone.
Consider Venezuela. Once the wealthiest country in South America, sitting atop vast oil reserves. Then came Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro with their Bolivarian revolution—nationalizations, price controls, wealth redistribution, the full socialist playbook.
The result? Hyperinflation that rendered salaries meaningless. Empty grocery shelves. Hospitals without medicine. Millions fleeing the country. Gangs filling the vacuum of state collapse. A failed state by any honest definition.
Or look back to the Soviet Union. For seven decades, it projected confidence—five-year plans, collective farms, grand parades. Leaders insisted communism was history’s inevitable endpoint. Instead, the world witnessed bread lines, gulags, stagnation, and, in 1991, total collapse. Gorbachev tried reform, but the structure was rotten. The people had endured enough.
These systems fail for a reason. They crush the human spirit, stifle innovation, and reward bureaucrats over builders.
Yet here at home, a new generation of progressive Democrats promotes recycled versions of the same ideas.
AOC and Jasmine Crockett often invoke humble beginnings to justify sweeping economic overhauls. But their own biographies tell a more complicated story.
AOC was born in the Bronx, yes—but her family moved to Yorktown Heights when she was five, a suburban community where household incomes regularly exceed six figures. Her father was an architect who ran his own small business. She graduated from Boston University with degrees in economics and international relations. That’s not oppression—it’s upward mobility in a system that rewards initiative.
Jasmine Crockett, the daughter of a reverend in St. Louis, attended the prestigious Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School before going on to Rhodes College and the University of Houston Law Center. These are institutions made possible by the prosperity and freedoms of a market-based society.
They flourished in the modern West—under free enterprise, private property, and constitutional liberties. Yet they now advocate policies critics argue would erode the very framework that enabled their success.
AOC also took aim at Marco Rubio’s Munich address and his call to embrace Western culture.
AOC can’t make up her mind—she often says there’s nothing more important than embracing various cultures, but she bristles at the idea of embracing Western culture.
Her critique of Western culture as “thin” drew swift pushback. Bishop Robert Barron issued a public response challenging her characterization.
There’s something more devious in AOC’s critique—she frames her ideas as common sense, but they’re borrowed from controversial thinkers. Here’s more from the bishop—
I’ve spoken with immigrants who have fled socialist regimes. One woman from Colombia told me she fears her country following Venezuela’s path. Another from Mexico expressed similar concerns.
The people always want freedom.
That’s the throughline in every failed socialist experiment: the people eventually demand liberty.
AOC, Mamdani, Jasmine Crockett—they have not lived under secret police, surveillance states, or forced labor camps. They built careers in a democracy that protects free speech, using technologies born of capitalist innovation, within an economy that allows dissenters to rise to power.
A wealth tax, critics argue, is not an isolated policy—it’s part of a broader philosophy that shifts control from individuals to the state. History suggests that path often leads to stagnation at best, tyranny at worst.
In the end, freedom has proven resilient. America’s system—capitalism paired with constitutional liberty—has generated unprecedented prosperity and lifted billions worldwide through trade and innovation. The Berlin Wall fell not because socialism surged, but because people yearned to breathe free.
Today, Venezuela struggles. Cuba wobbles. The Soviet Union survives only in textbooks.
Supporters of “Make America Great Again” argue that protecting the American system—not importing failed models—is essential to preserving that legacy.
To AOC, Crockett, and their allies, critics offer a blunt message: history is not on your side. Freedom is not a slogan. It is the engine that built the most prosperous nation in human history—and it remains the standard by which all other systems are judged.