NEW: Gov. Jared Polis “Concerned” About the Rise of Socialism, Rips “Typical Socialism Talking Points”

Gov. Jared Polis, 43rd governor of the state of Colorado, joined us on the Guy Benson Show today with guest host Ross Kaminsky to discuss his stand against a strain of socialism that is spreading across the Democratic party. Gov. Polis, who is a Democrat himself, said that he has “always been a strong capitalist” and that he is “concerned” about the spread of socialism, but that he is “more concerned” about the governing party’s implementation of nationalizing companies. Listen to the full interview with Gov. Polis and Kaminsky below.

Listen to the full interview below:

Listen to the full podcast below:

Read the full (automated) transcript below:

ROSS KAMINSKY: Let me share with you just a couple of sentences from a Facebook post that’s gotten a lot of attention here in Colorado and now nationally. And I quote, socialism dangerously concentrates political and economic power together. Government should be an independent check on the private sector, not the owner of it and not controlled by it. That was posted by Colorado’s governor, Democrat Jared Polis, who happens also to be a friend of mine and joins us now on the Guy Benson show. Jared, you kicked the hornet’s nest in your own party with that one.

GOV. POLIS: Well, you know, I’m really tying in a lot of what’s happening. As you know a lot people across the country, certainly most Democrats are not fond of President Trump for a variety of reasons. But the socialism that he’s exercising, literally buying government shares in Intel, having the Pentagon buy MP materials, literally taking over the economy. What I’m trying to point out is when you concentrate political power and economic power, you are simply giving even more power to the government. And that’s exactly what Trump’s doing.

ROSS KAMINSKY: So I get it. I get you’re a Democrat and you want to talk about Trump. And look, I agree with you on not liking Trump doing that stuff. But socialism right now is really a problem in the Democratic Party, and not in the Republican Party, and as a real political matter, like fights among Democrats. And I’m very curious how you see this. You’re the most prominent Democrat in the state of Colorado, And you’ve made a public statement that you don’t want socialists to destroy Colorado, and neither do I, because I live right here in this same state with you. So how are you thinking about this, this simmering, it’s more than simmering boiling over socialism, and we’re going to have an outright socialist anti-Semite as the Congresswoman from Denver.

GOV. POLIS: Well, I mean, first of all, this is nothing new for me. I’ve always been a strong capitalist. I mean the greatest force for prosperity is free enterprise. As a Democrat, prosperity is needed, strong social safety net, funding for our schools, healthcare, all those things come from a vibrant, successful private sector, not one owned by the government. So yeah, I’m gonna look, the Democrats are gonna have, I hope, 200 and some congress people in the next session and maybe five or six or seven of them might be socialists. But I’m more concerned about the governing party, which we talked about. The Republicans governing are exercising socialism. They’re literally buying, thankfully, they’re minority shares. They haven’t bought control of these companies. But the problem is when a government owns 10, 20% of a company, and they’re going through a government regulatory process to get something done, you know there’s gonna be favoritism there. This is what China does. Their military owns a large percentage of their economy. That’s the direction our country is going, literally to Pentagon, owning 15% of America’s top rare earth producer that puts the government into the mining and magnet business. And that’s wrong. That should be the private sector.

ROSS KAMINSKY: So I feel like I’m driving a car where the alignment is slightly out of balance. So the car is turning left and I need to grab the steering wheel and get us back on the road because I don’t want you to spend all your time talking about Republicans. We can do that. You know the Democratic Party much better than I do because like I said, you’re the top Democrat in this state. And I’m curious how you see the dynamics playing out with young people who seem to be like, you’re definitely to my left. These people are way to your left. And you’re younger than I am too, that’s right, but not better looking.

GOV. POLIS: Oh, I don’t know about that taller for sure, but you have more hair

ROSS KAMINSKY: So seriously, what, what do you make it? And I don’t need the nuts and bolts of partisanship. This could be more of a philosophical question, but what do make of so many 20 something, especially 20 something college educated white women supporting socialism?

GOV. POLIS: Well, I don’t know what race or gender they are. I mean, I’m certainly worried about people supporting socialism. And, you know, the case I make to Democrats, I know, you’re show, this is all Democrats listening to this. So this is just among friends, right? I know we’re public members of this show. So just among us friends, I mean, as Democrats, we care about things like funding our public schools, like universal health care. No social economy accomplishes that. Every country in Europe is capitalist. They have free universal health, in fact, to be a member of the EU, you need to have a market economy. It’s actually in their bylaws, written right in. So we can either go the route of socialist countries where you lose healthcare, you lose funding for the schools, government buys businesses, like, sorry, the Republicans are doing right now, but I can say, I’m just as against it if the Democrats do it, it’s not a partisan thing. So I’m concerned about the rise of socialism in both parties, absolutely. I don’t see it as a partisan things, but I think what people need is basic economics education. This stuff doesn’t work. It’s bad for the economy, bad for prosperity, bad for private sector, and it only cements more control in the hands of the government.

ROSS KAMINSKY: One of the things that you and I have debated over the 20 years or so that we’ve known each other is universal health care. You, you want government run health care and I don’t, and I’m curious, given that you are so skeptical of the ability of government to do large things well that why do you want government run healthcare? And do you think that that at least a little bit weakens your position as being a spokesperson against socialism.

GOV. POLIS: Well, first of all, I’ve never advocated, nor do I very hardly any Democrats advocate for government-run healthcare, like the VA or like the British system. What we talk a lot about, and I’m certainly supportive of, is the payer piece, right? Medicare, Medicaid, it should be privately run, absolutely, the profit incentive drives efficiency. I think that’s in many ways been co-opted by the current way we do healthcare. I think what people are frustrated about, and again, it’s not a left-right Republican-Democrat thing, are things like, Why are Americans paying three to five times as much for the exact same prescription drug that people can buy in Europe or Canada at a fraction of the cost? I mean, made in the same factory, same time we’re paying five times as much, we’re kind of being made fools of. That’s the frustration there. No, there should not be government-run hospitals like UK has. It should be the payer piece is what I look at. Of course, every capitalist country, except for us, every wealthy capitalist country has achieved universal healthcare, And I think that’s an important thing that we should achieve

ROSS KAMINSKY: But they’ve also they have achieved it. But usually the results aren’t as good as the United States results. But also they have much, much higher tax rates and lower standards of living than we do. Are you willing to make that trade? Are you willing to say, yeah, I’m going to raise everybody’s tax rates by 10 percent or put some national sales tax to fund that? And so, yeah. Let’s do that. And then I got one more for you.

GOV. POLIS: No, well, first of all, we don’t get better results. I wish we did. Our average lifespan is towards the bottom of the wealthy, industrialized countries. We’re in the middle of the pack. I mean, you look at European countries, Japan on health care outcomes, on lifespans on health. We don’t do better. I mean, do we have great healthcare in our country? Does it exist? Sure, can you get it sometimes? But we’re not, we don’t have better outcomes as a whole. Absolutely not. No, look, we need higher taxes for this. Frankly, we’d need lower taxes. We should be spending less on healthcare, not more. Let’s just take a sit back. We spend literally 16% of our gross domestic product. On healthcare in this country. The average across the ECD, the wealthy nations, is 9%. So we almost spend twice as much and we’re in the middle of the pack. So I’m all for spending more if we’re all super healthy and living longer, Ross. If the incentives were aligned, it could be worth it, right, I mean, what’s more important than our health? I mean 16% if we were all living to 96 and super healthy would be great, but we are not getting good outcomes.

ROSS KAMINSKY: So I will say part of the data for the United States that makes it look kind of mediocre is we have this part of population that tends to get sick or die young for gang stuff and that makes the life expectancy look worse. But let me ask you one other quick thing on healthcare and then we’ll do some other stuff for a few minutes. So One of the one of the things we’ve all seen in recent months is the exposure of all kinds of Government fraud Medicare fraud obviously, Minnesota is the poster child of this at the moment But it’s everywhere and the losses right. I mean the socialists like to talk about how bad it is that That private health insurance companies earn profits, but the losses to governments from fraud dwarf on a percentage basis the profit margin in these private companies. So why would we want government to be running these massive systems when they have already demonstrated that they cannot keep up with the fraud?

GOV. POLIS: Well, first of all, I’m arguing against socialism here, not for it, right? I mean, in this country, we already have, it depends how you count it, we probably have 90% or so people of healthcare, so we’re talking about maybe 10%, in some states it’s less than that. But no, I am not talking about government-run hospitals or anything like that. What I’m talking about is the danger of government owning the means of production, right, government shouldn’t be owning pharmaceutical companies, owning and running hospitals, that’s just in healthcare alone, and they certainly shouldn’t be owning steel companies or have, you know, right now the deal that President Trump did with U.S. Steel has a golden share where he actually appoints a director, a presidentially appointed director of a company who’s like their apparatchik overseer who has to personally approve on behalf of the president any plant moving or closures or investments. That is socialism, and that’s what I’m making the case against.

ROSS KAMINSKY: Yeah, so one other thing actually, just so listeners understand what we’re getting at here, Joelle, in a second here, I want you to play clip 44. So Governor Polis posted this note arguing against socialism saying he does not want socialism to destroy the state of Colorado. And of course, neither do I. And there is a socialist state representative from Northern Colorado who had a for Jared. Clip 44, please.

(SOUNDBITE) Can someone tell Jared Polis that you can’t have universal health care while protecting the profits of giant insurance companies? What we have here is one of the state’s richest men who has made his entire tenure as governor about padding the pockets of those as wealthy as him, trying to convince us that the real threat is socialism. Colorado, we can do so much better.

ROSS KAMINSKY: Okay, I don’t think you’re trying to protect the profit margins of private insurance companies. It sounds to me like you would like to get rid of private insurance companies and have the government be the only payer. Just quickly, is that right? What I just said?

GOV. POLIS: No, you can certainly have multiple payers. I’m not against having multiple payors. The key thing is to achieve universality like every country has. But what she did is kind of typical socialist talking points. She’s trying to play people against each other. I think that’s wrong based on race, based on how much you’re worth, based on gender. We’re all Americans, we’re all proud to be Americans. And frankly, you’re never gonna achieve universal healthcare like every other market economy in Europe has, unless you have a market economy. You need the prosperity and success of the private sector in a market economy to be able to have a basic social safety net. And you and I might cut that off at different levels, Ross, and I get that, like I think nobody should starve in a wealthy, prosperous country. I mean, basic needs, social safety nets, but the only way to achieve that is to have prosperous market economy, not a socialist economy.

ROSS KAMINSKY: OK, so I think this is maybe more important than than I thought to get to a very narrow point. What is your definition of universal health care? Because we’ve talked about, oh, does the government own the hospitals? You said no. Does the government on are there? Do we get rid of private insurance companies? You said, no, to that as well. I think socialists would say yes to both of those. So what do you actually mean by universal health

GOV. POLIS: Well, I mean, look, you have different versions of it in most other major countries. And some of them have six payers you choose from, some have unlimited payers, some of the basic Medicare, whatever their equivalent is for all, and people get private insurance on top of that. But right now, we are spending way too much, too big a part of our economy. It’s too big of a tax on everybody. We’re all paying it. I mean sometimes some of it’s hidden because your employer’s paying part of it. Certainly if you’re on your own, you’re seeing it yourself. But it’s an outrageous system and people are upset. I think that’s one of the reasons people are, you know, screaming socialism because they say, I don’t like the way it’s being done. They don’t understand that if they actually want universal healthcare, they cannot do that through socialism. I mean, the healthcare system would deteriorate and fall apart. But of course we should achieve it. I mean it’s not a radical thing. Every other capitalist market economy country does it. They all spend less than us and that’s effectively a lower tax rate than us.

ROSS KAMINSKY: We’re talking with Colorado Governor Jared Polis got about 90 seconds left. Do you so with socialists like that person who we just played the audio of, they automatically dislike and distrust basically any wealthy person. And you know that they are like that. Do you think that the fact that you are wealthy makes you a less effective spokesperson against socialism?

GOV. POLIS: Well, I mean, I certainly ran for governor on my business background. I’ve created hundreds of jobs. I’ve creating value. I’ve started businesses. I brought innovation into the economy. That’s not the only skill set you need to have as governor. I mean I also was part of a legislative body. I started schools and was active in education, but it’s certainly something that people of our country, Democrats, Republicans, and dependents value. They value people from many different backgrounds, but certainly having that as part of your background has always been a net plus for me in Democratic primaries and general elections. I think people, Democrats, overwhelmingly support the market economy. And that’s why I think it’s important to push back against socialists right now.

ROSS KAMINSKY: So I will just tell the Guy Benson audience the same thing that I tell my audience. Governor Jared Polis is a Democrat. He’s well to my left. And I am telling my listeners that I suspect that our next government in Colorado with the next governor and the next legislator legislature is going to make conservatives and libertarians like me long for the good old days of Governor Jared Polis. I’ll give you the last 23 seconds because I like prime numbers.

GOV. POLIS: Well, I think it’s important and you know, given who your listens are Republicans also push back against socialism in your own party Government should not be buying shares a company support the market economy and the most powerful mechanism for wealth creation and success that we have and it’s time to make sure that we has strong support for a market economy It’s always always have from both major political parties

ROSS KAMINSKY: Governor Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado. Thanks for making time for us, Jared. I’m very grateful.

GOV. POLIS: Thank you, Ross, take care.