AOC: Know who needs to get paid more? Members of Congress

I actually don’t mind the basic suggestion here. Given the level of responsibility and the costs involved with serving, I do think the pay should probably be higher than it is.

I’ve never been one of these CUT THEIR PAY types, especially the ones who think that’s the way to cut the deficit. (Compare the cost of entitlements to the cost of congressional salaries if you don’t believe me.) I’d like to see better performance for what they’re paid, but that’s the responsibility of the voters, who need to start making better choices of who they send to Capitol Hill in the first place.

Higher congressional pay is fine with me, but AOC’s advocacy of it nevertheless reveals how vapid her basic thinking is about pretty much everything:

In a tweet on March 13, Ocasio-Cortez went even further, arguing for an increase in lawmaker pay. Ocasio-Cortez said that “raising staffer pay helps get money out of politics” and that increasing the salaries for members of Congress could do the same.

“Members are paid more than avg – but job reqs 2 residences + we can’t take tax deductions for work costs,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “No one wants to be the one to bring up increases, so instead ppl take advantage of insider trading loopholes & don’t close them for the extra cash.”

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Ocasio-Cortez seems to have been responding in part to a rash of scandals involving members of Congress taking extra benefits. On the Republican side, Rep. Chris Collins was charged with insider trading and Rep. Duncan Hunter was accused of using $250,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses.

I’m sure she doesn’t realize it because she doesn’t think things through that carefully, but by making this one proposal she undermines her basic beliefs about both the role of government and wealth vs. poverty.

First let’s deal with the role of government: If you need to pay members of Congress more to keep them from being lured by corruption, then what you’ve acknowledged is that power corrupts. There are a lot of people who’d like to be paid more and could use the money, but members of Congress have a particular susceptibility to corruption because they have so many opportunities to engage in it.

Socialists like AOC want to turn control over the economy to politicians, and yet the same AOC has just acknowledged that you need to pay politicians a lot of money to keep them from using that power in a corrupt fashion. Strike one against socialism.

The second problem is the blow this strikes against AOC’s views on “wealth inequality.” She notes that the work is hard, that the requirements are difficult and that the stakes are high, and then posits that for these reasons people should be paid more. Fine. I don’t disagree.

But what did she just unwittingly acknowledge? That there are reasons some people are paid more than others. You have to pay members of Congress more to get people good enough to do the job (or so goes the theory anyway). The same is true of CEOs, of doctors, of engineers, of airline pilots. It’s true of investors too, because investors take risks and the rewards have to be sufficient to incentivize exposure to risk.

Some people make less because factors like these are not present. There are lots of people who could do what they do and there isn’t as much risk or burden involved in doing their jobs.

If that was not true, why would AOC think she needs to make more than her staff? She brags that they are paid well, she she needs to be paid much, much better for all the reasons she offers.

But that’s not equal! Of course it’s not. Because it doesn’t work that way and shouldn’t.

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Did AOC just learn something?

I know. Probably not.