Unify Action - June 15, 2026


He Feels SAFER in Mexico Than America — You Won't Believe Why


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

162.01

Word count

1,593

Sentence count

97

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Is socialism better than capitalism? Is Mexico a better place to live than the United States? Is it more socialist than the Scandinavian countries? What is the difference between socialism and capitalism? What are the benefits of socialism in Mexico? What does it take to live in a socialist country?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Don't you guys just love talking to random socialists on the street?
00:00:03.480 They always have their facts so horribly wrong.
00:00:06.820 It's quite entertaining.
00:00:08.660 I recently had a conversation with a guy on the street,
00:00:11.480 and he claimed that not only is socialism better than capitalism,
00:00:16.120 but he also said that Mexico is a great place to live.
00:00:19.420 Violence erupts in Mexico.
00:00:21.840 And tried to make that case. 1.00
00:00:24.140 Very interesting. Let's see what he has to say.
00:00:30.000 I'm from the States.
00:00:35.560 Okay.
00:00:37.020 Yeah, so what do you think of socialism?
00:00:38.740 And you might have a different take than most Canadians.
00:00:41.260 I would think that it's preferable to come, 1.00
00:00:44.000 judging from what I've seen.
00:00:46.380 Okay.
00:00:47.580 But have you seen socialism work?
00:00:50.660 Yeah.
00:00:51.640 Where?
00:00:54.200 Copenhagen.
00:00:55.760 Ah, so you're thinking Scandinavian style.
00:00:59.300 Yes.
00:01:00.000 Okay. That's not socialism.
00:01:02.840 Okay. It's democratic.
00:01:05.600 So it's a capitalist welfare state.
00:01:08.380 So they're still very, very capitalist, almost more free market.
00:01:11.460 So the Scandinavian countries, they rank higher on the economic freedom index than the United States.
00:01:17.800 So they allow wealth accumulation.
00:01:21.120 They allow capitalist billionaires to exist even more than the United States does.
00:01:25.280 right so they so in scandinavian provinces they don't have i'll make one quick correction here on
00:01:34.820 what i said so yes they allow a lot of wealth accumulation in the scandinavian countries um
00:01:41.140 but they still have less billionaires in the united states simply because the united states
00:01:45.960 just has a larger size of economy and it's more attractive for companies to be there but there's
00:01:51.340 still a lot of billionaires in the Scandinavian countries because their tax burden is much,
00:01:56.160 it's lighter on the higher income brackets because they learned the hard way that you can't have a
00:02:02.540 big government and expect the rich to pay for it. It's either big government or you run out of money
00:02:08.680 because higher taxes on the wealthy chase the wealthy out. But I didn't have time to explain
00:02:13.680 that there. Any minimum wage. Most of them, almost none of them have a minimum wage at all.
00:02:19.520 So they have strong unions and very high taxes on the middle and lower classes, right?
00:02:27.140 So all their tax burden goes on the lower classes.
00:02:30.540 So in the United States, say you've got that top 10% everyone's railing at, right?
00:02:34.420 All those billionaires, millionaires, the top 10% of earners.
00:02:36.980 Yeah, the 10% goes down somewhat further than that.
00:02:40.880 Okay.
00:02:41.500 Yeah, I'm in the top 1%.
00:02:43.800 Okay.
00:02:44.960 And I do not have anywhere near a billion.
00:02:48.320 Right, but...
00:02:49.220 That's in the United States, the top 10% of earners in the United States.
00:02:55.580 I only care about net worth.
00:02:57.880 Okay.
00:02:58.340 I don't care about earners.
00:03:00.540 Net worth is the only measure I can.
00:03:03.260 Right.
00:03:04.580 But in the United States, the top...
00:03:06.260 You know, I was thinking about where I like things and how they work is Mexico.
00:03:10.300 So he didn't let me finish there, but the stat that I was trying to quote is that in
00:03:14.680 In the United States, the top 10% of earners, so the people that, the top 10% that make
00:03:19.500 the most money year by year, pay about 45% of the income tax in the United States.
00:03:24.320 So that's a large chunk of the income tax.
00:03:26.220 It's already very, it's a very progressive tax system and already the large, the higher
00:03:31.160 earners are already paying a lot more, right?
00:03:34.220 But in the Scandinavian countries, like say Sweden, the top 26% pay exactly 26% of the
00:03:40.640 income tax.
00:03:41.960 it's much less of a progressive tax system which makes it honestly less socialist it's the same
00:03:47.320 with denmark and the other countries as well except for norway who is backing down now and
00:03:51.720 adding like inheritance tax and stuff so it's it's different it is a lot more economically free
00:03:59.560 but that's the point that i was trying to make there but now we get to mexico
00:04:05.160 okay everyone seems to have work to do
00:04:07.800 and the family structure is strong enough to take care of virtually everyone right that's a family
00:04:16.620 structure not necessarily a government structure no but it seems that mexico is an easier place to
00:04:23.080 live i don't know they certainly have trouble with cartels i haven't done a lot of research
00:04:28.520 okay so i didn't know a lot about mexico and their tax system so i had to do some research
00:04:35.080 on this. And if his claim is that Mexico is more socialist, that is completely false. They're in
00:04:41.480 fact less socialist than Canada. They don't have the universal health care that we do in Canada.
00:04:47.740 Our health care in Canada is entirely publicly funded, but in Mexico they have a mixed system.
00:04:52.760 So they have some public institutions that are tax funded, but they also have a private health
00:04:57.340 care sector. So that is allowed to coexist beside each other and those who can pay go to the private
00:05:03.200 sector, so there's less burden on the tax-driven side of the public health care, which honestly
00:05:07.760 is less socialist. They have less welfare and a much less progressive tax system than Canada,
00:05:15.200 so a lot less social programs, and in fact Mexico has the lowest effective tax rates
00:05:20.400 among all the OECD nations. So Mexico does have some state-owned monopolies, but not a lot,
00:05:26.480 and in general they have less government intervention. It makes sense then that their
00:05:31.280 unemployment rate is only 2.5 percent in mexico whereas in canada it's 6.6 sometimes up to 7
00:05:38.880 which is dangerous territory so they have a lot of jobs like he's claiming but that's about all
00:05:46.320 the rosy sides that there is to mexico their living standards are a lot lower than they are
00:05:51.200 in the united states in fact just based on the exchange rate alone a worker in mexico earns about
00:05:57.600 a third of what an American, the average American worker earns, three to three and a half times
00:06:03.000 lower. So that is a significantly less, but things are cheaper there, but they're still poorer. So
00:06:10.980 they have less government intervention, less inflation, but also a much poorer economy.
00:06:17.920 And I think a lot of that is due to a very low trust society and also a lot of cartel activity
00:06:25.900 as we'll get into and this was actually our bit of conversation on that on their living standards
00:06:32.260 but they're the cartels are relatively restricted you know they have to be largely tied to us
00:06:41.220 to get money so to the extent they're fencing drugs that's all near our border so you get down
00:06:52.680 the Oaxaca or in the Baja. I feel much safer there than I do. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
00:07:03.900 All right. Yeah. So he ended the conversation there, but he's claiming that the cartels are
00:07:08.840 relatively restricted and don't have a lot of power throughout all of Mexico, but that is not
00:07:15.960 necessarily true. So the cartels are active in about 20 states across Mexico, although they have
00:07:21.440 region basically everywhere in Mexico. The reason that he's just not seeing cartels when he visits
00:07:26.240 Mexico is because they're largely kept outside of any tourist center. So if someone visits Mexico
00:07:32.300 in all these touristy areas, they're not going to see a lot of cartel activity, but anywhere else in
00:07:37.760 the rural area, the cartels are fairly unchecked, although the military has been slowly trying to
00:07:43.380 crack down on them. Now, why does Mexico have such a lower living standard? Part of it could be
00:07:51.400 government corruption. Part of it could be a low, low social trust because they've had a historical
00:07:59.240 problem with very corrupt police. And I've heard stories from a lot of people going down into
00:08:04.520 Mexico that have had to bribe policemen just across the country. I don't know if that's still
00:08:09.160 the case, but that was before. And they're slowly, hopefully, slowly moving away from that. But
00:08:14.760 bribery itself does destroy a nation. So even though Mexico is technically a much more of a
00:08:20.280 your economically freer country there's a lot of downsides for example their homicide rate is like
00:08:26.040 five times the rate of it in the united states which is insanely high their rule of law they
00:08:31.960 don't have a real rule of law there's so much corruption there's so much lack of social trust
00:08:37.240 so there's there's so much bribery all these things are fighting at any real social progress
00:08:42.840 in mexico and couple that with policy uncertainty in the country you can see why they still leg
00:08:48.600 behind in living standards. So even though they have economic freedom, they don't have a strong
00:08:54.200 rule of law, and the cartels still operate. So I don't know where he's getting the idea that he
00:09:00.360 feels safer in Mexico. Maybe there's a more police presence in the tourist areas, which obviously
00:09:05.420 makes sense, but the people in Mexico are five times more likely to die of homicide than the
00:09:12.000 people in the United States. So they're not safer, and it is not necessarily a better place to 0.73
00:09:18.600 live. The living standards are much lower. And even though there's less inflation, there's also
00:09:24.240 just less money in general. So Mexico overall, I don't rank it a great place to live and it's
00:09:32.140 not socialist. And that's basically the whole of it. All right. Thanks for watching, like,
00:09:39.280 subscribe and comment. And if you like the work we do here at Unify, we do have the PayPal link
00:09:44.400 on our YouTube homepage. If you want to support us, that would really help our workouts. All right.
00:09:49.200 Thanks. Bye.