The Quest to Destroy Work

After spending this week vacationing in Florida’s disease-ridden paradise, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) was diagnosed with COVID-19. This was devastating news for the Instagram superstar, who had to be quarantined. She returned with an extraordinary message for all ages, much like a brilliantly incomprehensible phoenix from the ashes.

“Welp, so it happened,” she wrote, in truly Tolstoyan fashion. “Got COVID, probably omicron. Today, I’m thankfully recovering and am wrapping up quarantine. However COVID wasn’t a joke. For a while I’ve noted the term ‘mild’ is misleading when the bar is hospitalization and death.” After dispensing with the preliminary medical advice, Ocasio-Cortez got down to business — or rather, to the business of avoiding doing business. She explained, “The idea of forcing people to work just 5 days after symptoms start is sociopathic and 100% informed by a culture that accepts sacrificing human lives for profit margins as a fair trade.”

To put it mildly this is dumber than a bunch of rocks. People with COVID-19 serious symptoms should not be allowed to return to work. People with mild or non-existent symptoms should not be encouraged to go back to work. Without employees, businesses cannot function.

Fortunately for us, the brilliant, “So Fresh, So Face” congresswoman has a solution: community. She means community. She also refers to your money. “If you’ve noticed,” she writes, “much of the emphasis on media conversations on COVID are individualistic — if there’s one lesson I think we as a country are repeating until we learn, it’s that community and collective good is our best shot through our greatest challenges — way more than discorded acts of ‘rugged individualism’ and the bootstrap propaganda we’ve been spoon-fed since birth … Let’s create team WE in a world full of MEs. (Blue heart emoji)”

What is this illustrious congresswoman suggesting? Businesses could pay employees to be home, if they’re mildly or severely symptomatic. The government might also regulate such activities or make taxpayers pay for it. This accords with other proposals from Ocasio-Cortez, such as her Green New Deal idea to provide “economic security to all those who are unable or unwilling to work.”

And Ocasio-Cortez’s message is mirrored by even higher-level politicians like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who once proposed that Americans be provided nationalized health care so that they could leave their jobs en masse, thereby freeing them to “be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever, an artist.” In the view of the far Left, work is a bad, foisted upon unwilling individuals by a cruel and arbitrary system. Americans could escape the daily tyranny of life if the system was run in a proper, top-down manner by brilliant minds such as OcasioCortez and Pelosi.

It is actually the reverse. As it turned out, someone must pay the bills. Americans love working. People find their work satisfying. Unemployed people are more likely to be depressed than those who work. They also have a higher rate of depression than those who have been employed for longer periods. Americans do not want to wait for their government checks and spend their time in apartments. They are even less likely to shop at the grocery store if there is a shortage of labor.

Ocasio Cortez, Pelosi and others don’t need to fret about it. Ocasio Cortez can also Instagram live from her house or Zoom in to congressional conferences calls. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t need to fret about profit margins because she can always cut those of others.

Democrats once posed as the party for labor. They’re now more the party of people who would avoid it.

Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side Of History,” and “Bullies.”