Socialist Party USA's VP Candidate Tries to Defend Socialism on FNC

The 2008 vice presidential candidate of the [1]Socialist Party USA, Stewart Alexander, had a tough sell over the weekend. 

Alexander appeared on FOX News Channel’s “Bulls and Bears” Apr. 2 to make the case for socialism. His claim that “capitalism is a complete failure” met with derision from the panel, who countered with statistics, facts and numbers that Alexander couldn’t refute.

Host Brenda Buttner reminded Alexander, “Socialism has been tried in many, many countries. All of them have higher levels of unemployment rates, they, they have uh lower productivity, they have lower standard of living. So where exactly has the success been?”

Unable to produce any socialist success stories,  Alexander tried to turn the focus back to the United States as an example of failed capitalism. “Let’s look at the examples ya, you have here in the US. It’s not working,” he insisted, “…I don’t have to look for any examples other than right here.”

Alexander cherry picked instances of capitalism’s failure to help “the working people” get a break. “We’re talking about at the turn of the 19^th, of the 20^th century, also around the time of 1929. All of this is capitalism. Capitalism has been a complete failure! And look at today.”

Matt McCall, founder and president of Penn Financial Group, responded, “Capitalism is what is made for the working person to work their way up in class, so I think that’s completely wrong.” The free markets, McCall said, caused the job creation boom in the 80’s and 90’s. And because of capitalism the standard of living has “done pretty well in the past 1,100 years.”

When Gary B. Smith, Exemplar Capital managing partner and developer of www.TheChartMan.com [2], stated that under capitalism, people of “almost any income category” experience a higher standard of living than the rest of the world, Alexander sputtered, “Standard of living of the rich, of the rich. What about the poor?! What about the poor?! What about the poor?!”

As Smith mentioned and Alexander would not acknowledge, the standard of living of America’s poor has indeed increased. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector tracked how the average person defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau experienced an increase in living standard over decades, and that the average person classified as poor lives in conditions that were considered “comfortable or well-off” just a few decades ago.

Perplexed by Alexander's weak defense of socialism, Tobin Smith, ChangeWave research editor, asked Alexander “are you kidding me? You haven’t given us one number, one statistic, one number, one anything! You are, you are your worst salesman.”