Of course, in the dreamy mind of AOC, any time would be the time to pay people to stay home. That’s the whole point of socialism. The virus is just the excuse of the moment, and it always starts with an excuse:
To get the virus under control, we need to pay people to stay home.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 19, 2020
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I kind of hate to take this so seriously as to offer a substantive rejoinder, but I think a few are worth making.
First, paying people to stay home doesn’t work the same way as paying people to work. When you pay people to work, you assess their work and their attendance, and if it’s not satisfactory, you fire them.
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If you’re paying people to stay home, what do you do when they don’t? Withhold their paychecks? Because now you’ve taken away their incentive to do it and they’re all running around. Or maybe you double their stay-at-home bribe to further incentivize them, in which case the people who were doing it all along are mad.
Also, follow the science, AOC. You don’t “get the virus under control” by making everyone stay home. You simply delay community spread. Remember the glory days of January, before there were any known cases in the United States? Just imagine the wonder of a lockdown that could get us back to that, right? Everyone who has it either dies or recovers, and bang, no more COVID cases.
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But just like in January, it’s only a matter of time until someone brings it into the country from somewhere else, and now it’s spreading again. Lockdowns accomplish nothing.
The only way to get the virus under control is to approve a vaccine, or several vaccines if there is more than one candidate worthy of approval – as appears to be the case.
Finally, if you give socialists what they want and “pay people to stay home,” at what point do the socialists agree it’s enough already and they should all go back to work?
Obviously, never.
