Socialism ‘greatest threat’ to U.S., former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley tells Pa. Chamber

Nikki Haley, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke on her successes as the former Governor of South Carolina and the need to support capitalism in the United States during her keynote address at the annual Pennsylvania Chamber Dinner.

Haley addressed an audience of business leaders and legislators from across the commonwealth at Hershey Lodge’s Chocolate Ballroom on Monday.

The daughter of Indian immigrants and small business owners, Haley grew a passion for business at a young age. She said she began helping her mother with the bookkeeping for her retail clothing and gift store business at the age of 13.

“When you grow up in business, it gets in your blood stream,” Haley said. “You may go on to do different things, but you never stop looking at the world as a business person.”

It was that outlook on business that would eventually lead her to championing business growth as Governor of South Carolina from 2010 to 2017.

Haley led her state with an emphasis on creating an environment for businesses to thrive by limiting regulations and helping businesses partner with schools to train

the workforce for new industries entering the state. The former governor said that other states could learn from South Carolina’s attitude towards business.

“Incentives are used in a lot of states but what the folks in New York who drove Amazon away don’t get is that incentives are short term,” she said. “Businesses would rather have the right long-term environment than incentives that will run out.”

Haley also cited socialism as the greatest threat to the country’s economy and its businesses. Everyone, she said, has an obligation to educate young American’s about the dangers of socialism.

“(Socialism) leads not just to poverty but to oppression,” she said. “It leads to Venezuela, it leads to gulags. America’s collective amnesia about this has become a real threat.”

The Harrisburg-based chamber invited Haley to speak soon after she announced late last year that she was resigning as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Haley was nominated for the position in January 2017 by President Donald Trump and acted as ambassador from 2017 to 2018.

After the keynote, Haley spoke with Gene Barr, president of the Pennsylvania Chamber, for a Q & A session.

Barr asked Haley about her time at the United Nations and what she took away from her two years as ambassador. Haley said she believed the concept of the United Nations is a sound one but that the intergovernmental organization will continue to be irrelevant until its ambassadors are willing to talk about problems internationally that they currently shy away from.

The Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, in part, because it prevented her from discussing human rights violations in Venezuela because Venezuela was a member.

“If you have a human rights council and the members are Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Venezuela — and when I left they just named the Democratic Republic of the Congo — it doesn’t get funnier than that,” she said. “The Europeans would come to us and say that the United States was our last great hope, ‘you have to stay on the Human Rights Council,’ and that was exactly why we got off. If we were the last great hope, all we were doing was making it legitimate and we were giving it value and it didn’t deserve that.”

Haley ended her conversation with Barr by noting that the current political climate is more toxic than it has ever been, to the point of hearing politicians referring to their rival party as evil.

“That struck a chord with me because I have seen evil,” she said. “I have seen the pictures of children who have died from chemical weapons from Assad. That is evil. Our parties are not evil. On our worst day we are blessed to be in America.”

Next month, Haley said, she will begin campaigning for President Donald Trump’s reelection.