Economics major, socialist, and 29-year-old congressional newbie Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants a seat on the House Financial Services Committee. According to The Hill (with a hat tip to Breitbart News):

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Thursday said she is interested in a seat on the powerful House committee overseeing the financial sector. Ocasio-Cortez told Hill.TV in an interview Thursday that she's "looking at" serving on the House Financial Services Committee, which leads congressional regulation and supervision of U.S. banks, lenders, insurers and housing industry. The Financial Services panel is one of the most sought-after House committees. It's [sic] members wield significant influence over Washington's relationship with Wall Street, and the panel offers access to millions of dollars in financial sector campaign donations.

My first reaction is that obviously, the incoming Democratic committee chairwoman, Maxine Waters, wants someone there to make her look less stupid and ignorant. Because just about the only person who can manage to do that is Ocasio-Cortez, whose economic illiteracy, despite an economics degree from Boston University, has been shown again and again.

According to Hill contributing columnist Anne Rathbone Bradley, Ocasio-Cortez's understanding of economics is basically that of her fellow socialist, Hugo Chávez. The latter, who left his country in ruins, got his economic plan going by making the vast oil bounty of Venezuela a starting point for government spending, with money-printing and debt the final resort. Spend, spend, spend, and never worry about how to pay, which is the extent of Ocasio-Cortez's economic proposals. It's so naïve it makes her college look bad. According to Bradley:

Graduates of Boston University's economics program are supposed to be able to "understand economic theory ... and be able to apply these models to evaluate policies and real­-world events," according to the school's website. Ocasio-Cortez would do well to understand that the path to prosperity is not built on government handouts but on free people unleashing their human creativity to advance the common good. An honest to goodness economics debate between Ocasio-Cortez and her opponent could have been a sorely-needed corrective lesson. By exposing the flimsy arguments of central planners like Ocasio-Cortez, it may have helped young people understand economics better than any college course ever could.

Ocasio-Cortez has also revealed the depths of her economic illiteracy in small things, telling more about what she doesn't know than perhaps she intended. According to R. Cort Kirkwood of the New American, Ocasio-Cortez is a big-time user of the car service Uber, the one she denounces when others use it, writing:

Of course, nothing is wrong with using Uber, unless you're a democratic socialist who denounced the organization for driving cabbies to suicide. That's what media darling Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: NYC's fourth driver suicide. Yellow cab drivers are in financial ruin due to the unregulated expansion of Uber. What was a living wage job now pays under minimum. We need: - to call Uber drivers what they are: EMPLOYEES, not contractors - Fed jobs guarantee - Prep for automation

She also lamented the closure of a restaurant she used to work in, failing to recognize that her stance on a soaring minimum wage was what did the restaurant in. According to Kirkwood:

But the former barmaid doesn't seem to understand that one of the policies she proposes, jacking up the minimum wage to stratospheric levels, is one reason the restaurant closed. The owner told the New York Post that New York's new wage for businesses that have more than 11 employees helped make his decision. With 150 employees, he simply couldn't foot the bill. "The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees," he said.

Michelle Malkin uncovered more of Ocasio-Cortez's economic whoppers in her column, published in National Review:

But when the time came to put her BU economics education to work, Ocasio-Cortez flunked. On PBS last week, she asserted that "unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs." Moreover, the erudite B.A. holder in economics posited, "unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids." Egad. This nonsense needs more unpacking than a cross-country Mayflower moving truck. The unemployment rate, which stands at a historically low 4 percent, is calculated by extrapolating and dividing the number of people out of work by the total number of individuals in the American work force. If you have one job, two jobs, three jobs or more, you don't count as unemployed. Whether you are working 40 hours or 80 hours or 120 hours a week, if you're working, that has no effect on the unemployment rate, either. The number of workers moonlighting and the number of hours they moonlight have zero, zip, and nada effect on the unemployment rate.

This is all just basic stuff, and it's clear she doesn't understand economics. What does she understand? Thus far, the main thing we see is ego (note how she brags about herself in Malkin's column and, for that matter, here) and a lack of cash for an apartment.

Maybe that explains the real reason she wants the seat, given the field she can't understand. Waters made herself a rich woman chairing the House Financial Services Committee, and it's obvious that Ocasio-Cortez wants money, too. Could she be angling for a chance to dip her snoot into the shakedown trough, as Waters has before her, and as Breitbart and the Hill, cited above, note that the seat is used for? Fancy stuff for me, but unemployment for thee? Living like Bernie Sanders, with a plethora of houses? Because, after all, how much is enough (for a leftist)?

And hasn't she shown some evidence of commercial skills (read: selling out) by dropping her opposition to Nancy Pelosi as House speaker for...something? Odds are, she will get the prestigious House seat despite her economic illiteracy, because she has already sold her soul to Pelosi.

What we can expect if such a scenario takes place is the old congressional swamp pattern – of a destitute incoming congressperson exiting a millionaire. Ain't socialism grand?