In America,
socialism is hot again.
Democratic socialism
is your kids public school.
It's our interstate highway system.
It's the researchers and scientists
paid with our taxes.
We can do better
when we do them together.
Really?
I know better
because I'm from Guatemala.
I've seen the impact of
socialism.
My father escaped Cuba.
My grandfather
suffered under Communists in Hungary
before escaping.
As a child,
I was taught socialism was wrong.
I grew up mocking it,
but democratic socialism sounded okay.
It made sense to me that
government should take care of the economy.
It's complete anarchy.
But then, I watched socialism fail in Latin America.
I learned that
every time a country
started down the socialist path,
it failed.
When Castro came to power,
people were excited.
They cheered.
He was going to help the poor
and make everyone equal.
But the result?
Sailing for freedom
aboard an old green Chevy truck.
Hundreds of thousands fled Cuba.
Here, in Little Havana in Miami,
Cubans who escaped are eager to remind people
how bad life in Cuba had become.
This man's father was a doctor.
My father had to sell
illegal meat
out of his ambulance in Cuba
because the government wouldn't pay him enough.
I mean, Cuban doctors earn like less than 1%
than American doctors.
You don't see any future,
everything is stagnated.
Healthcare, education,
nowadays they're in ruins.
I told a Venezuelan,
my Venezuelan friends, we warned you guys.
Venezuela did not listen.
They followed Hugo Chavez down the
socialist path.
Chavez's promises impressed American celebrities too.
He's a very fascinating guy.
This is you and Hugo Chavez.
He says, help me write my speech.
Chavez said,
I'll take from the rich
and give to the poor.
When there was no money left,
the government just printed more.
That caused inflation,
a million percent inflation.
Now, a chicken costs this much.
When business owners raise prices
to keep up with inflation,
government often took away their businesses.
That's what's happening to this man.
Chavez seized lots of private property.
Chavez seized thousands and thousands of businesses
just took them away from their owners,
yet most Venezuelans
liked that.
People was clapping so hard
they were like, oh finally
there's somebody here making social justice.
But government grabbing private businesses
created shortages of almost everything.
Why did you leave your country?
It's like the apocalypse,
it's no food,
no medicine.
How do you feel when you see other countries
with the same mistakes that Cuba has made
for the past decades?
Terrible.
Michel Ibarra escaped Cuba
and says Venezuela should
have learned from Cuba's failure.
People in other countries in Latin America,
they will blame anything else besides socialism.
Blaming socialism for Venezuela's riches-to-rags story
is grossly misleading.
And there are plenty of socialist countries
that look nothing like Venezuela.
When I talk about democratic socialism,
I'm not looking at Venezuela,
I'm not looking at Cuba.
I'm looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.
Why not try my Swedish tradition?
Scandinavia is now called a socialist success.
Even people jailed in Venezuela
like Francisco Marquez say that.
I mean, you have Norway, you have Finland,
you have these type of countries that are democratic
that have democratic institutions,
and many of them have socialist policies.
In Scandinavia,
private business is largely left alone.
Governments don't even set a minimum wage.
Freedom rankings score Scandinavian countries
high on property rights
and business freedom.
Old Danes enjoy welfare benefits.
Yes, there's a big welfare state,
but it's funded by thriving free enterprise.
There we go.
Denmark.
But so many American politicians
say Denmark is a socialist paradise,
that Denmark's Prime Minister felt compelled to reply.
Denmark is far from socialist
planned economy.
Denmark is a market economy.
So
if Scandinavia is not socialist,
where has socialism ever worked?
Nowhere.
What would you say to the Americans
that like the idea of socialism
and support it here?
I would say that they should wake up.
You don't need the government to dictate
how to live your life,
how much money you should make,
how your family
should be treated
or how much you should pay.
If anything, I think taxes are still a bit high here.
But it's the best we have in the entire world.
Think about that
the next time you hear Michael Moore and celebrities
praising socialism.
Socialism wrecks economies,
wrecks lives.
And in addition,
it kills.
In my next video,
I'll show you why, under socialism,
violence is inevitable.