You wouldn’t know it by listening to her, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a self-described “democratic socialist,” actually has an economics degree.

You wouldn’t know it because she is constantly harping about capitalism, the single-most successful economic system in the history of humankind, while instead advocating for a combo of socialism, Marxism, and communism, all three of which history is replete with examples of abject failure.

Worse, when she harps about capitalism, she can’t even be honest about what kind of system it really is, how it works, and, importantly, why it works.

A general definition of capitalism, via the Merriam-Webster dictionary — pretty mainstream — is that it’s an “economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.”

The reason why capitalism is superior to all other economic models is largely due to the competitive nature of it; make a better product more people need, and presto, you’ve got a winner.

But in an interview with Yahoo Finance, AOC trashed capitalism as she has done in the past as an economic model that only benefits a few at the expense of everyone else (that’s actually socialism and Marxism but we digress).

“To me, capitalism… is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost.” Rep. @AOC says. “What we’re also discussing is the ability for a very small group of actual capitalists… [to] capture governments. … That is not a redeemable system for us…” pic.twitter.com/U7RS2hkiJs

— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) February 3, 2022

“Capitalism at its core, what we’re talking about when we talk about that is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost,” she said, going on to claim that capitalism empowers only a “very small group of actual capitalists,” who she said “have so much money that their money makes money and they don’t have to work.”

“They can control industry, they can control our energy sources, they can control our labor, they can control massive markets, that they dictate and can capture governments, and they can essentially have power over the many,” she claimed of the small group of “actual capitalists.” “And to me, that is not a redeemable system for us to be able to participate in for the prosperity and peace for the vast majority of people.”

Mind you, every single small business owner in America — and there are literally tens of millions of them, many of which are very successful in their own right — is a capitalist. So yes, the system does work for the masses, not just the few.

Anyway, Ocasio-Cortez then exposed herself as just another left-wing Democrat hack with an opinion when she turned her ire toward the billionaire Koch family simply because they tend to donate to Republicans, criticizing them for “having control over the vast majority or large plurality of our oil assets in the United States.”

“Private families having control over means of production, that is essentially the capitalist system that we live in,” she told host Andy Serwer. “It is a small group that is of privatized control over what we eat and how we fuel our society.”

Never mind that leftist billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros literally donate to causes that unduly influence the outcome of elections (for Democrats, of course). And both of those ‘gentlemen’ are certainly capitalists in every business sense of the word.

That said, Zuckerberg’s creation, Facebook, did not escape AOC’s war on wealth; she said that the platform has “completely corrosive ways.”

“Facebook should be broken up,” Ocasio-Cortez declared. “We should pursue antitrust activity on Facebook.”

While there may be legitimate complaints about Facebook and other big tech platforms, understand that this demand is coming from a 30-something former bartender who has never started a business of her own and grown it to be a success. But notice how quick she is to attack others who have.

As for capitalism and the ‘pursuit of profits at all costs,’ that is what keeps businesses afloat and growing and it is what keeps roughly 164 million Americans working.

You’d think an economics major would understand that.