Envy, as we all know, is one of the seven deadly sins.  And yet, if you are a Democrat these days, it may be the only virtue.  For tens of thousands of years, the natural state of human beings was poverty, misery, and death. Then came private property, along with governments that formed to protect it, as well as free markets formed to trade, invest, and expand that private property. We all live better now than the richest man on earth did just 100 years ago, or 80 years ago, or even 60 years ago — by far. But for the Democrats, that system of free markets is evil and immoral and wrong, not because free markets have produced poverty or misery, far from it, but because there are a lot of people who envy those who create wealth. They envy the people who innovate, compete, and win. I’ve called these envious people “scavengers.” The virus of socialist envy never, ever dies. The not-so-brilliant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on a podcast with a woman named Ilana Glazer, where she made the rather incredible statement that it is not possible to earn $1 billion.  Here was the exchange: Ocasio-Cortez: You can’t earn a billion dollars. Glazer: That’s right.   Ocasio-Cortez: You just can’t earn that.   Glazer: That’s exactly correct.   Ocasio-Cortez: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.    Glazer: Yup.   Ocasio-Cortez: You can pay people less than what they’re worth. Glazer: Yup.  Ocasio-Cortez: But you can’t earn that, right?    Glazer: That’s right.   Ocasio-Cortez: And so you have to create a myth that — since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it. The amount of brainpower in that room could toast a piece of bread — lightly. Absolute oatmeal for brains there. Of course, you can earn $1 billion. The way that you earn $1 billion in the private sector is by providing goods and services to millions of people who want to pay for them. That is how you earn $1 billion. You innovate a new product. Lots of people want it, and then they pay you for it. That is how you make money. But this sort of stupidity has become de rigueur for the Left. Ocasio-Cortez then pushed this further on X, writing, “The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are (sic) stolen from American workers.” She’s not talking here about the wage theft of the government coming in and literally confiscating a giant chunk of your paycheck every month. She thinks it is wage theft for companies not to pay wages that she thinks they should pay. Ocasio-Cortez is shrill, dumb, inexperienced, and uneducated. It has always been a Marxist lie that capitalism impoverishes the worker. It is not true. It has never been true. Every prediction Marx ever made about the future state of the world was wrong. All of them. Which is why, in order to achieve his vision, governments eventually had to kill tens of millions of human beings. He projected that there would be a gigantic class struggle: never happened. He predicted that capitalism would impoverish everyone: it didn’t. All that Marxism is really rooted in, in the end, is pure, unadulterated envy. Ocasio-Cortez cited Bernie Sanders as the founder of the movement, saying, “In a lot of ways, we’re all kind of Bernie’s successor.” There is no one who’s been a bigger leech on the ass of American society than Bernie Sanders. The man has not held a productive job for literally 80 years. For 80 years, he has lived and sponged off the taxpayer. Sanders is now targeting Sergey Brin for the great crime of founding Google, saying on X, “Google founder Sergey Brin’s wealth has DOUBLED to $311 billion since Trump’s election. Now he’s spending $57M to oppose a 5% billionaires’ wealth tax in California. He’d rather millions lose healthcare than pay his fair share in taxes. This kind of arrogance is unacceptable.” According to whom? You’re a tyrant. And by the way, it is you who are arrogant because you believe you are entitled to Sergey Brin’s wealth.  Kamala Harris has implied she should be able to basically dictate wages, imagining a world “where if you work a 40-hour week, you can afford your rent and food on the table and maybe a vacation from time to time, not scraping to get by, praying you can get through the end of the month.” That is so vague as to be utterly worthless. First of all, the vast majority of people in the United States who work a 40-hour week can afford rent. They’re not living on the streets. They’re affording rent. It may be too expensive; they may not like it, but the vast majority of them are not homeless, and they can afford food because starvation in the United States is at zero. No one is starving to death in the United States. Socialists and people who hate free markets posit that if you work 40 hours a week in the United States, you should be able to afford all sorts of things, and the only thing stopping you is this system they don’t like. It’s just crap. It’s just nonsense. It’s important to note that places like California that have decided to follow the AOC-Bernie Sanders path — wealth is terrible, and innovation is awful — are losing people. They are losing income. So the question is, why do the Democrats keep doing this? It can only be envy. The promise of Marxism is not a better future. The promise of Marxism is a better human being. That was always the promise of Marxism. It is a lie. It is untrue. Human beings are human beings wherever you go. Human nature is human nature wherever you go. The idea that you’re a better person if you believe in redistributionism is a lie. Free markets are good. Free markets are based on a simple principle: You, as an individual, have creative power in the universe. You’re made in the image of God. You have control over your autonomy. You have the ability to control your labor. Your innovation is your own, and you ought to own it. There are time machines on planet Earth. They’re called airplanes. Take an airplane to a third-world country that does not protect private property, that does not believe in equal rights before the law. See how it works out for you. It’s terrible. It’s awful. Meanwhile, you’re living here in the United States, the greatest country in the history of mankind, and you have a magical device you carry in your pocket every day, filled with more technology than the tech used to put a man on the moon. You’re carrying that around every day, and you have a button on that phone that will magically deliver a product to you without any effort on your part, other than hitting the button. That product will have been sourced from 80 different countries, and you’ll never know about it. That’s the power of free markets, which is rooted in your specific priorities. You’re not a victim in the system. You get to decide what you want to buy. You get to decide what you want to sell. You get to decide how much you’re going to spend on a thing, or whether you don’t want to spend that much money on a thing. The idea that you, as an individual, get to decide what a thing is worth to you is the basis for free-market economics, meaning that it is the most individualistic system that has ever been conceived of by mankind. That’s what price systems do. We aggregate the value over time, and then we figure out what the average person is willing to pay. You innovate; you compete; things get better. It is not just a utilitarian case. It is a moral case. The Left hates that moral case. They want something completely different. They are driven by envy. And that’s a sin.