Fox Business host Charles Payne had no patience for incoming “Squad” member Congressman-elect Jamaal Bowman’s (D-NY) absurd claim that American capitalism is “'slavery by another name.'”
During the Dec. 22 edition of America’s Newsroom on the Fox News Channel, anchor Trace Gallagher asked Payne for his take on Bowman’s sentiments. Payne didn’t mince words. He said that “we’ve heard these comments before,” and claimed Bowman’s attacks on American capitalism were “dangerous.” Payne warned that what Bowman said was indicative of the “concerted effort — a[n] organized, smart, brilliant effort — to bring down America’s capitalistic society and to replace it with something that has been disastrous everywhere it’s been tried.”
He also rebuked Bowman’s claim that capitalism is “[o]ne that keeps the majority of Americans unemployed, or underemployed and struggling just to survive, while the power elite continues to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.” As Payne retorted: “Factually — certainly within America — it’s, the majority of people are not unemployed, even in the midst of this horrible pandemic. In fact, most people in America have seen amazing upward mobility.”
Watch the segment below:
As Payne stated, “[I]t’s not just the U.S. story.” He continued: “Capitalism, particularly as rich nations have gone out and invested in poorer nations — you go from 1990, for instance, to now — one billion more people left poverty.” Payne noted that poverty “around the world is $1.90 a day.” Payne assessed that these people have now “entered into the middle class. We’ve gone from 37 percent of the world being in extreme poverty to less than 10 percent now. All that’s driven by gains from capitalism.”
Gallagher then followed up Payne’s comments by approaching Bowman’s anti-capitalist rant from another angle. Gallagher asked Payne, “Even when you hear conservatives saying things like — you know — ‘There is too much concentration of wealth in the hands of the few,’ Charles, do you know what remedy they’re trying to seek?”
Payne shot this angle down by saying such discussion about a “remedy” to the distribution of wealth is a slippery slope. Payne even took a shot at former President Barack Obama for making similar claims, even though the former president is now making millions.
According to Payne, “You know, the remedy, it worries me, because if you start talking about the redistribution of wealth and you start to say, ‘Well, who do we empower to make these decisions? Who gets to decide what is too much?’ I remember when President Obama made a comment very similar to that — you know — ‘When is it enough?’” Payne continued: “Well, no one is asking that about [Obama’s] book deals, about his TV deals, about all the other things that probably now, his net worth, is well over $100 million.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818-460-7477), CBS News (212-975-3247) and NBC News (212- 664-6192) and tell them to report properly on Bowman’s anti-capitalism comments and defend the American system that has brought so many out of poverty and into prosperity around the globe.
