Fox Business
Op-Ed: Sen. Rick Scott
October 1, 2019

The American Dream. It’s not something that’s easy to define, but every American understands it instinctually. It’s part of our ethos.

Our founders created the greatest country in the history of the world, where anything is possible. We have the freedom to get an education, raise a family, travel, pick a career, and live in peace. Few countries are like America.

It really is amazing. And it’s important to stop and think about it sometimes – what we have and what we could lose if we let Democratic socialists have their way. And make no mistake; Democrats want to bring socialism to our country.

I’m a big proponent of the American Dream because I’ve been blessed to live it. I grew up in a poor family. My mom and my adopted father, who was a truck driver, worked hard to put food on the table and provide for my siblings and me. I started working at seven years old and haven’t stopped since.

By the time I was 35, I had built a successful company that employed hundreds of thousands of people.

Every day, we enjoy the freedoms inherent in this American experiment. It’s what we know, expect, deserve. But we shouldn’t take it for granted. Complacency is dangerous.

We can’t ignore the fact that our nation’s freedom is never guaranteed, that everything we’ve built can be gone in an instant.

I worry about future generations and the freedoms that they might lose if we allow socialism to flourish in our country, and it’s time for you to worry about it, too.

Right now, extreme liberals, both in Congress and in the campaign for president, are promoting a socialist agenda that would reverse the progress of our country and strip American families of freedom and opportunity. We’ve heard their proposals.

“Medicare-for-all,” or as I like to call it, “Medicare-for-none,” would ruin the Medicare system as we know it and throw 150 MILLION people off the private insurance they like.

According to independent estimates, the proposal would cost upwards of $30 TRILLION over 10 years.

I recently asked the Congressional Budget Office to do a score, and asked the Democrats promoting this disastrous proposal to join me.

So far, crickets. And we all know why…they don’t actually want the American people to know how much it costs.

They’re also touting the Green New Deal, or the “Green job killer”, which would bankrupt our country and is expected to cost homeowners up to $100,000 in the first year alone.

The Democrats want to wipe out all student debt. It sounds nice, but isn’t sustainable and doesn’t get to the root of the problem: tuition is too high and colleges and universities are not held accountable.

In fact, if you just eliminate student loan debt every decade or so, why would the colleges and universities ever change their ways? This would create an incentive to raise tuition and fees forever.

These are not serious proposals by the Democrats. It’s just virtue signaling to their extreme base. But we should be worried about what these proposals represent. They represent the mainstreaming of a new socialist movement in our country.

Big government doesn’t work – just look at the failure of ObamaCare. Ronald Reagan’s famous warning that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” rings as true now as it did then. However, back when Reagan made this charge, the Democratic Party opposed socialism.

This new socialist movement thinks that the best way for American families to succeed is to grow government, raise taxes and plunge our country into more debt.

These Democrats talk about being progressive, but they are actually regressive. They claim to be liberal when in fact the very policies they support would strip Americans of their liberty.

We can look to the past and to countries across the globe to remind ourselves that socialism fails every time. Just look at the absolute devastation in Venezuela right now, or the decades of suffering for the Cuban people.

As the saying goes, the problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other peoples’ money.

Socialism produces a weak economy that hurts everyone. It deprives individuals of freedom and opportunity, kills innovation and would destroy the American experiment as we know it.

Winston Churchill said it best when he said, “The inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

The success of our economy depends on free-market capitalism, which has been the greatest force for economic progress in the history of the world.

Rather than restrict the freedom of Americans, we should embrace and thank God, for the opportunity capitalism gives us for limitless achievement.

We can’t reverse the progress of capitalism. We can’t let socialism become commonplace in our country.

Socialism is the single most discredited idea from the last century, we cannot allow anyone to take us backward in this terribly damaging direction.

Our children and grandchild deserve the opportunity to pursue their dreams in a free country – dreams that do not and cannot exist under socialism.