I am not aware of his travel experiences. I'm not going to make that judgment, but I do laugh at the "left-right" commentary I see in the US media. And in fairness, Buck does score fairly high on the Socialist scale, otherwise. However, that doesn't change the fact the political environment prevents him from realizing that ideal. He has lamented that point in the past IIRC.
Well, we are likely to test something akin to that hypothesis in Canada after Oct 19th, if the momentum continues rolling the way it is. The promise is to tax the rich (mostly corps), but not for such glib reasons, and that money is going to be funneled into (what appears to be) a shitload of programs across the board to lift the lower quintiles. However, it will be a minority gov't so it's not likely to gain as much traction as they advertise. I also suspect they aren't going to do much in the way of re-nationalizing any industries, for similar reasons, which is too bad; we fucked up when we let our petroleum industry go completely private.