Speaking to a rally to promote the lunatic Green New Deal that would bankrupt America while allowing China, India, and the rest of the world to continue to emit CO2 without restriction for more than a decade, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed the fount of her economic thinking: Karl Marx.

Fittingly, she was accompanied by avowedly socialist presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders at a rally at Howard University, where both radical politicians denounced anything short of a full commitment to the radical restructuring of our economy.  Obviously alluding to frontrunner Joe Biden's less than full-throated support of the GND, Ocasio-Cortez said there is "no middle ground," setting up a potential third-party green-socialist absolutist challenge should Biden win the Dems' nomination.

But most interesting to me was Ocasio-Cortez's descent into the logic of her position, compared to the logic of markets:

What we fighting against — what we fighting against is a logic that says it is OK to pay someone less than they need to live, and we are here to say no more.

Here is video of the portion of her speech where she touched on her economic principles.  I notice that she is gesticulating more emphatically than in the past and seems, if anything, more impassioned than before:

Grabien screen grab.

By tying pay to what people need, rather than to the value of the work they produce (to anyone willing to pay for it), she echoes one of Karl Marx's most famous dicta (from the 1874 "Critique of the Gotha Program"): "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

That seemingly humane principle for valuing work is the key to both the idealistic appeal of communism and its tragic consequences for those who embrace and follow it.  Under it, people who do not produce as much as they earn are incentivized, impoverishing the rest of society.  The most vivid illustration of this phenomenon was presented by the late Peter Drucker in a lecture of his I attended in the 1980s.  He recounted his visits to factories in both East and West Germany that derived originally from the prewar Zeiss optical works.  In the East German works, employment had remained the same as it had been prewar — if I recall, the number of employees there was huge, well over 10,000.  No investment or effort was devoted to efficiency improvements, since they would only diminish employment that provided sustenance "according to their needs" for the workforce.  Meanwhile, in the West German works, employment was a tiny fraction, and yet the output was more highly valued on world markets.

As a result, East Germans lived at a much lower level of consumption than West Germans, who, because they valued work and the products of work according to the market mechanism, mightily prospered.

Ocasio-Cortez is a classic watermelon environmentalist: green on the outside, red on the inside.

Here is the full text of the video excerpt, via Grabien:

OCASIO-CORTEZ: "For years of denial and years of abdication of leadership and responsibility, we finally are stepping into that void, taking our future for ourselves, and we will change this country and we will change the future to be more just because a logic that we are fighting against right now, this is not just about putting solar panels on our homes. We are fighting against a logic that says poisoning and giving communities cancer is ok if an oil company can post a q1 profit , and we are here to say no more."

(Cheers and Applause)

OCASIO-CORTEZ: "What we fighting against- what we fighting against is a logic that says it is ok to pay someone less than they need to live, and we are here to say no more."

(Cheers and Applause)

OCASIO-CORTEZ: "What we are also fighting against is a logic that says we can extract enough off of human life and our environmental resources to the point of destroying our own humanity just to post profits. No more. We will not accept that anymore. We cannot accept that anymore."

(Cheers and Applause)