Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination to face Donald Trump, sponsored a new bill that would shake up the economy on socialist lines. A Fox News economist responded to this horrible idea by essentially asking, “Have you even heard of Venezuela?”

“Venezuela is a good example of what we should not be doing,” Stuart Varney, a British-American economic consultant who graduated from the London School of Economics and hosts the Fox News show “Varney & Co.,” said on “Fox & Friends” Monday morning. He then tied Venezuela’s crisis to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s new bill.

“Last week, Elizabeth Warren wanted to have political control over business,” Varney quipped. “She wanted big business to go to Washington and beg for permission to do business. That’s political control over enterprises. It’s a terrible idea. That’s why Venezuela’s gone down the drain.”

Warren announced her new bill in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Tuesday. “Pocahontas” would end corporate chartering by the various states, replacing this decentralized system with a mandatory chartering from the federal government if a corporation has more than $1 billion in annual revenues, as reported by The American Prospect. Warren’s bill would also require corporations to have 40 percent of their boards of directors elected not by shareholders but by their employees.

The American Prospect‘s Harold Meyerson praised this legislation as a second New Deal. Liberals often forget that the big government New Deal policies actually made the Great Depression worse, and Varney noted that this kind of big government policy sparked the crisis in Venezuela.

“Venezuela is now what I would call a wheelbarrow economy,” Varney quipped. “In other words, you’ve got to fill a wheelbarrow full of currency to buy anything — that’s how bad inflation has become.” This week, the socialist president Nicolás Maduro has launched a plan to take “five zeroes off the end of the old currency and turn it into a new currency.”

“So instead of six million bolivars to the dollar, they’ll lop off the last five zeroes and make it sixty bolivars to the dollar,” Varney explained. “That’s not going to work.”

Maduro’s response to every problem? More government. Last March, as the country suffered a famine, the socialist government seized bakeries and arrested bakers. This year, a team of Roman Catholics trekked into Venezuela to deliver Communion for Easter.

“Venezuela has become the Somalia of Latin America, people fleeing left, right and center, creating a refugee crisis all around, and a chronic, chronic catastrophe in Venezuela itself,” Varney lamented. Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley called for regime change in Venezuela this past May, noting that refugees from the socialist country were destabilizing Venezuela’s neighbors.

In an act of delicious political irony, Maduro endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president in 2016. Warren, a devotee of Sanders’ socialist ideology, may also receive the Venezuelan president’s kiss of death in 2020.

For Americans who know what socialism has done to Venezuela, candidates like Sanders and Warren should be utterly unacceptable. If the United States is to avoid such poverty and devastation, Americans cannot afford to elect any socialist candidate, much less one endorsed by the man who helped destroy Venezuela.