Donald Trump has nominated 59-year-old former Wall Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Moore to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank, the central bank of the United States, which sets interest rates and exerts a high level of control of the American economy. But in a CNN report on Friday, Moore was exposed as holding troubling political views — even saying that capitalism is “more important than democracy.”
He also said as recently as last year in a talk to the Heritage Foundation, posted on YouTube , that there is no need to set a federal minimum wage. In addition, Moore described Social Security a “a Ponzi scheme,” according to CNN .
In a 2009 interview with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore (no relation to Stephen Moore), the Trump Federal Reserve nominee explained his controversial views on the democratic system, as seen in an excerpt posted on the video site Vimeo .
“Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy,” Stephen Moore said in the documentary film Capitalism: A Love Story . “I’m not even a big believer in democracy.”
Moore goes onto say in the interview that he is in favor of “the right to vote and things like that,” but in his view “democracy doesn’t always lead to a good economy or even a good political system.”
President Trump’s Federal Reserve pick Stephen Moore is a self-described “radical” who said he’s not a “big believer in democracy” https://t.co/fyZ6UG2ERF pic.twitter.com/w0zuw7lBai
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) April 12, 2019
Asked to comment on the 2009 interview by CNN, Moore said the following.
“I believe in free market capitalism and representative government. It is what has made America the greatest nation and the most prosperous nation on earth.”
Moore also told CNN that he does not support abolishing the federal minimum wage — but he does favor abolishing Medicaid, the system of public health insurance administered by individual states with funding from the federal government that provides health coverage to low-income Americans who cannot otherwise afford health insurance.
“If we sat here and tried to think how can we make the dumba**, you know, Medicaid system the worst system possible we would come up with what they have right now,” Moore said in a 2018 talk to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, posted on YouTube .
Moore told CNN that he stands by his earlier comments on Medicaid, and that he believes that low-income Americans should be given “medical savings accounts” and told to purchase health insurance “on the open market.”
But the right-wing economic pundit has also called for abolishing huge segments of the federal government, including the Internal Revenue Service, as well as the Departments of Labor, Energy, and Commerce, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to The Hill .
