Socialist and progressive figures have found a lucrative platform attacking capitalism, according to economist Stephen Moore, who says they have grown wealthy inside the free-market system they want to overhaul.
Moore, a former senior economic adviser to President Trump, told Fox News Digital in an interview that the United States is uniquely positioned to reward people who criticize capitalism.
He said public figures, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and online political commentator Hasan Piker, have benefited from the wealth and opportunities created by the American economy while advocating socialist policies.
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"There's no country in the world where you can get rich off of attacking free market capitalism better than in the United States," Moore told Fox Digital. "And so you have dozens of these prominent voices in the socialist movement on the Democratic side who actually are rich, millionaires or more, and they attack the very system that made them rich in the first place."
Moore said a recent USA Today opinion piece made a similar argument. The story was titled "Hasan Piker's luxury lifestyle isn't what Marx had in mind."
It read in part, "America's loudest democratic socialists have a problem: Many of them are too rich. Hasan Piker, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and an entire class of young socialist influencers are all extremely wealthy. Yet even though their wealth was acquired through a capitalist system they see as immoral, they give very little of it away."
"It is remarkable how many of these leading, so-called advocates of socialism have come from rich families or have gotten rich on capitalism themselves," Moore said. "So even people like Bernie Sanders are wondering whether there's a degree of hypocrisy here. I mean, there's a reason why just about everybody in the world wants to come to the United States. It's not because we have socialism, it's because we have free market capitalism."
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Moore also questioned whether wealthy advocates of wealth redistribution should voluntarily give up more of their own assets and challenged progressive leaders to explain why they continue to benefit from capitalism while criticizing it.
"I think the capital H is for hypocrisy here, and if these people really believed and share the wealth policies that they keep espousing, maybe they could start with themselves," Moore said. "Maybe they could sell some of these assets and give the money to the poor, but it turns out, by the way, that liberal socialists tend to be the least generous in terms of charitable giving. There was a very famous book on this. So it turns out that free market capitalists tend to be very generous in sharing their wealth, but not so much so democratic socialists."
The economist said some socialists try to conceal their wealth to appeal more to the public.
"They try to hide their wealth from Americans so they can pretend like they are working-class people," Moore said. "But if you look at the people who are really at the head of the democratic socialist movement and the people who are spending a lot of money, those tend to be very rich people themselves. This is, as I said before, this is the only country where you can get rich off of attacking the free market capitalism system, which really creates the wealth in the United States in the first place. It's the reason why so many people come to this country from socialist countries and they get here and they say they don't understand why anyone would want to have more socialism in America when they've seen it fail in their own country."
Fox News Digital reached out to Piker, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren for comment.