Ron DeSantis contends that young people who say they prefer socialism to capitalism may be doing so in part because “true capitalism” isn’t being practiced in the United States.
Responding to a May 2025 poll from the libertarian Cato Institute that found 62% of adults under 30 years of age like “socialism,” the Florida Governor told Fox News viewers on Saturday that they had never actually lived under capitalism in a pure form.
“When they say they prefer socialism to capitalism, some of the things they’ve seen in our economy, in their lifetimes really isn’t true capitalism. I mean, you know, bailing out the Wall Street banks …. Corporate welfare, cronyism. We’ve seen that in various forms in the last, you know, 20 years throughout American history,” DeSantis told friendly interviewer Kayleigh McEnany.
“So I think that some of the things that they’re told is capitalism is actually not free enterprise. It’s a perversion of capitalism. So certainly a free enterprise system has produced far superior results than a command economy, whether it’s socialism or communism. But ultimately, you know, they’re going to see with what they see (SIC).”
The Cato poll also found that 34% of young adults had a favorable view of communism, at least conceptually.
“In other words, roughly one-third of young Americans say they’re fine with an ideology that has outpaced Nazism in terms of body count. (The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, documents that about 100 million people died in the 20th century because of communism.) In addition to the communist fans, some 32 million young Americans are fine with socialism,” Cato’s writeup said.
