Remember the Green New Deal? Well, as it turns out, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was just getting started.

The New York Democrat recently released a new platform, the Just Society legislative package. The proposal includes five bills and one resolution. Its goal is to “build a just society to protect our communities and uplift our neighbors” and do so by “combat[ing] the greatest threats to our country, our democracy, and our planet: economic inequality and climate change.”

Taken in its entirety, Ocasio-Cortez’s Just Society platform is a mix of pie-in-the-sky, utopian rhetoric and bad socialist policy. Policymakers should reject such an idealistic and collectivist approach to governance out of hand.

Big day!



We’re rolling out our next major project: A Just Society.



It’s a 6-piece suite:



1. Recognizing Poverty Act

2. Place to Prosper Act

3. Mercy in Re-Entry Act

4. Embrace Act

5. Uplift Our Workers Act

6. Ratify the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, & Cultural Rights



⬇️ https://t.co/nPhVxIy7fQ — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 25, 2019

The very basis of her anti-poverty plan is absurd. The first bill in Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, the Recognizing Real Poverty Act, would instruct the federal government to reevaluate the official poverty line to include geographical variations and “needs," such as internet access. The socialist congresswoman has said she thinks the poverty line should be as high as $38,000 in annual salary. This would triple poverty overnight, classifying many working-class, self-sufficient Americans as if they were in dire need of government intervention.

Besides, the poverty line doesn’t even indicate whether or not someone is actually living in poverty because it doesn’t count government benefits. So Ocasio-Cortez is saying that someone earning nearly $40,000 before any government benefits should be classified as “poor,” and, likely in her mind, thus entitled to even more handouts.

Ocasio-Cortez’s second bill is where the actual socialist policy comes in. It would enact a national rent control program, a federal mandate binding landlords throughout the country to a limit of 3% annual rent increases.

This isn’t just a massive government overreach: It’s economic illiteracy, too. As I have previously written :

Price controls just restrict the supply of housing, because they discourage developers from building more housing by lowering potential profits. This, in the long-run, will send rents soaring in non-rent-controlled areas. Meanwhile, property owners who do face rent restrictions may convert their apartments to condos or otherwise stop renting them, rather than rent out their property at artificially low prices.

Ocasio-Cortez’s next two bills are about who can receive government welfare.

The Mercy in Re-entry Act would entitle felons and others with criminal convictions to full eligibility for welfare programs and government benefits. Basically, felons could get public housing, food stamps, and so on. Similarly, The Embrace Act would extend full eligibility for welfare to illegal immigrants. According to Fox Business , this would include Medicaid, unemployment benefits, welfare, and food stamps.

That’s right: A key part of Ocasio-Cortez’s grand plan to end poverty is to force taxpayers to subsidize illegal immigrants and felons.

Next, she moves to punish businesses who don’t comply with her socialist vision for society. Her final bill would instruct the Department of Labor to prioritize the awarding of federal contracts to companies that have paid maternity leave, a $15 minimum wage, and so on. Apparently, asserting government control over private business practices is more important than, say, being a responsible steward of taxpayer money and awarding contracts to the most efficient, least expensive bidder.

In classic Green New Deal style, though, the most radical part of the Just Society package is the resolution it includes. Ocasio-Cortez’s plan would have the United States sign on to an international accord that states all people “have the right to work, fair and just conditions of work, social security, an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing, housing, and healthcare.”

While that might sound nice in the abstract, it’s a vision of positive rights — the right to something rather than freedom from — that inevitably involves massive amounts of socialism.

A right to healthcare? Well, that would have to include the right to force doctors to provide care, perhaps for less than it costs them to give. And that requires a government takeover of healthcare.

A right to housing? Well, surely the government must meet that right by taking over the private housing stock and dictating who lives where, at least, that’s the inevitable conclusion of such a free-wheeling approach to rights. And in a similar manner, all of the “rights” and pie-in-the-sky, utopian clauses of the Just Society ultimately lead us back to one place: an expansion of the power of government to interfere in markets in ways that have been proven counterproductive.

If Ocasio-Cortez really wanted to fight poverty, she would be embracing capitalism and free trade, which have done more in the last 30 years to reduce global poverty than anything else in human history. But the Just Society is not about that, it's about unicorns and rainbows and feeling good about oneself while turning America into a poorer and less economically vibrant place.