On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host debunks the talking points claiming that Nordic countries are socialist and that the United States should model their countries after their example. Transcript and video below.
Bernie, AOC, they want to tell you that the socialism that they’re pushing is like the Nordic countries. It’s not like Venezuela. Not a lie. The Nordic countries have relatively free economies, and they have no minimum wage. None of those countries have a minimum wage.
Sweden has a universal school choice, a far more free-market approach to education than even the United States has. Iceland has a freer economy than the United States, according to the Heritage Foundation index for economic freedom.
If AOC wants to be more like Iceland, then she ought to support freeing up the economy, not increased socialism. The former Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen puts the point very clearly. He says, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
But what AOC and Bernie Sanders are pushing is a socialist planned economy. And it’s so disingenuous if you hear Bernie Sanders or AOC talk about this. Bernie Sanders didn’t have his honeymoon in Denmark, and he didn’t go on his honeymoon to Iceland. He went on his honeymoon in 1988, the day after he got married, to the Soviet Union. In fact, I’m sorry to say we have video of this Bernie Sanders shirtless drinking vodka singing commie songs with the Russkies in the Soviet Union in 1988.
Bernie Sanders was so enthralled with the Soviet Union, with Soviet communism, the most repressive regime on Earth, and one of the most repressive regimes in the history of the world, that he took his honeymoon there. He didn’t want to go to Scandinavia, he wanted to go there, worse even than Venezuela. And to remind you that he’s not pushing policies that would bring us to Iceland, and he’s pushing the policies of Latin America — just three years earlier in 1985, Bernie Sanders was defending socialist breadlines in Latin America.
Bernie Sanders: “It’s funny sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing. In other countries, people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Bernie says, “bread lines are a good thing, in a lot of countries the rich get food and the poor starve to death.” Right, in socialist countries that’s what happens. That’s what’s happening in Venezuela right now. And if they don’t starve to death, they get run over by tanks. That doesn’t happen in the United States. Nobody starves to death in the United States. The biggest problem afflicting the poor in the United States is obesity. The problem among the poor in the United States is that they’re eating too much — that’s not what happens in socialist countries. They starve to death while the rich and the well-connected and the cronies all benefit.