Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has once again stuck her foot where her mouth ought to be.

Speaking to a group of activists in Austin, Texas, last month, AOC concluded that the the real problem in America has gone undiscovered and undocumented for a long time. It seems, she said, that “we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem."

Despite evidence that the growing economy and a stronger labor force is lifting people out of poverty in the U.S. — in ways that President Barack Obama’s green stimulus never did — she says we just need a bigger green deal, controlled by the government.

Her dismissal of capitalism as “irredeemable” and her prescription of green socialism, is — in her cortex — our real problem in the 2020 presidential campaign. Because despite its defeat in the Senate, the Green New Deal won’t go away. Bad Democrat ideas rarely die. It took over 20 years from the time Democrat presidential candidate Bob Kerry first proposed Obamacare to its passage in 2010.

I have spent more time living in a so-called socialist country (four years) than any of the so-called congressional Democrat Socialists; or any imaginable Democrat nominee for president. And like most such countries—the exception being China—my former host country is running away from their socialist past as fast as they can.

When a Stalinist country said “Work, Bread and Freedom,” they were really serious about the “work” part. The other two parts—bread and freedom—were just witticisms, disguised as sarcasm.

If you don’t have a job in a socialist country, you are expected to find one. If you can’t find one, you are expected to create one.

The available jobs for the unemployed are: selling cosmetics and clothes on Facebook; selling state lottery tickets; singing Karaoke in the street with an amplifier powered by a car battery that is pulled by your wife. Folks often just pay these people to stop singing and go away.

Most people hold two or three jobs in addition to a job for minimum wages.

One of the first people I ever met in a socialist country put this way: “This isn’t like America. If I don’t work, they don’t give me money to live and to eat.”

So she worked each day, never taking a day off.

Her job of choice was selling sunglasses, oriental paper fans and other trinkets in tourists’ areas. Every day she traveled more than 15 km by bus, toting 40 pounds of goods on a sandwich board that she hefted from 8 in the morning to past midnight. Her area was roughly two square miles that she travelled on foot. Her only days off were when she had an eye-infection and was in the hospital.

I have personally witnessed people rummaging through the detritus of leftover bones in a tub of dishes in order to make soup for their family. It’s a fairly commonplace occurrence.

But there are other ways of making ends meet.

Some younger women work in bars, kind-of-sort-of like AOC did, but not exactly. They too work for tips. But they don’t get to bartend. They get tourists to buy them drinks, and occasionally offer other commodities as well.

Bartenders and waitress? Those are some of the worst paying jobs in the country. No one would be so foolish as to actually tip a bartender or waitress. They can’t afford it. Their socialists, not capitalists.

Where do you think this is? Manhattan or something?

The United States currently pays about 19 percent of its GDP for social welfare programs. That’s up from 13 percent in 1980 and it’s just slightly below the average of OECD countries which spends 20 percent of GDP on social welfare. We have been able to increase social spending while decreasing military spending over the last 40 years because the American economy is one of the greatest forces ever created.

It creates a lot of excess that’s shared at home and around the world.

Our greatest asset is this American economy — the capitalist part, the part that creates jobs, the part the rest of the world admires and tries to emulate. That’s where all that money comes from to pay for all those social programs.

Let’s face it: A lot countries have huge mismanaged “green” economic plans like AOC proposed. But there is only one American economy.

And the real problem in our country is that political exploiters of poverty like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Obama either don’t understand the American economy or don’t appreciate it.

John Ransom is politics and economics writer/editor with offices in Washington DC, Singapore. You can find him on Facebook @ here and here.