Rachel Campos-Duffy visited Florida State University Tuesday on behalf of the Young America’s Foundation to discuss defending capitalism.
Campos-Duffy, a nationally known speaker, graduated from Arizona State University with a master’s degree in international affairs. Her husband, Sean Duffy, is a politician who works with CNN.
The foundation focuses on spreading knowledge to young adults in order to better educate them on individual freedom from the government. Campos-Duffy began her speech with a short flashback about how her farther strived to escape poverty by transitioning from Mexico to the U.S in order to succeed in life. He lived the American dream, she said.
Her father’s parents were so poor that they couldn’t afford to buy him underwear for school, so he would get picked on as a child. She added that he had enough of being bullied and decided to become an entrepreneur by starting his own piñata business at the age of 14.
At the age of 18 he joined the military while working part time as a dish washer at a restaurant in Spain where he met her mother, Maria del Pilar.
“Politics in the next 10 months will be focused on capitalism vs. socialism,” Campos-Duffy said. “Donald Trump advocates for keeping power in the hands of the higher class.”
Illiterate citizens are in danger of the government controlling everything because they can’t write or read well enough to know what it is going on, Campos-Duffy said.
Sixteen percent of millennials are not able to define socialism, she added.
Ja’mauri Glover a political science undergraduate student, said the government will limit the amount of money he can make by making the economy survive on socialism. “I feel like Trump with help from the government will allow the country to be ruled in a dictatorship,” he said.
Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont who is among those vying for the Democratic nomination for president, wants students to attend school for free. He also wants to abolish student debt as one way to help middle- and lower-class citizens who can’t afford college.
Campos-Duffy believes that Sanders’ idea is just a hidden way to get people to vote for him because, if debt is taken away, then taxes will rise for the middle and lower classes, she said.
Derrick Standifer disagrees with Campos-Duffy. He says socialism can work if people pool their resources to improve the environment. Standifer is a graduate student working on a doctorate in educational leadership.
Campos-Duffy argued that the country’s capitalist economy has made the U.S a blue-collar market. Dish washers and fast food restaurant jobs are rising more than ever.
Socialism, she said, leads to economic desperation.
“We want financial independence and not scraps off of the government’s table,” Campos-Duffy said. “It is up to the young people to become more educated and independent to stop the government from limiting their ways to grow.”