In an article that is well worth reading, real estate billionaire and philanthropist Sam Zell explains why he thinks that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal won't is doomed to failure.
Zell says that Americans still prefer work to government handouts.
CNBC has the relevant quotes:
"Everyone in America wants to be rich. Everybody in America wants to succeed," Zell told CNBC on Wednesday. "That's, by the way, what made America great, because everyone wants to move forward. Everybody wants to contribute. Everybody wants a piece of the pie, rather than wants it given to them."
But don't we all want to be equal?
Redistributive policy leads to inequality. It's just the opposite of what you think," said Zell, who contended that wealth redistribution during the eight years of former President Barack Obama's administration held the economy back.
Market Watch also highlighted the CNBC interview but focused on a different angle: Zell's zinger about New York Congressman Gregory Meeks, a Democrat.
Meeks is making noises that he'd like to try to renegotiate a deal with Amazon, which ended a high-stakes bid to estabish a headquarters in New York after demands from progressive politicians.
Zell, who mistakenly thought the mic was off, apparently challenged the Congressman's sincerity, calling his apparent efforts "a crock" of something unprintable.
Zell regards the Amazon loss as huge:
Zell, who made a fortune in real estate before he was 30 and is often credited with creating the modern-day real estate investment trust, or REIT, said that, in his experience, companies like Amazon want “certainty” and leadership and speculated that the Amazon location in Queens imploded due a lack of those factors.
Zell, who was serving as a co-host on the CNBC morning program “Squawk Box,” described the factors that led to Amazon’s quitting the HQ2 project in Gotham as a “tyranny of the minority” and said it would go down as one of the area’s great political mistakes.
Amazon's decision to call a halt to the deal led to the loss of an estimated 25,000 jobs for the area.
Americans, as Zell said, want to work.
But sometimes progressive policies make it awfully hard to find a job.