Thomas Sowell again has a brilliant piece about whether Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist where he points out:
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
The democratic party certainly has abandoned the concept of traditional socialist belief that state ownership of the means of production, unless you are one of Uncle Bernie’s retarded children, and has decided they can live quite well with control over the economic decision making process – the power to pick winners and losers behind a veneer of legality – coupled with a legal system, staffed with their cronies, that can be used as a weapon against their enemies, political or otherwise. Sowell is dead on that these crooks have chosen to run things in this way so they can take credit for things that go right, even if these happen despite their actions (think fracking, oil production, or energy production in the US), and lay blame with others when things go horribly wrong (think Obama administration period). In the mean time they can steal at their leisure (think TARP or Porkulous), making the rich they choose to favor richer, while both growing the dependent base that votes for them and destroying the middle class. From the article:
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies.
Sowell gets it. I had several of the usual suspects point out that the only reason Obamacare is not working is resistance from evil republicans and corrupt business. These idiots used the exact same arguments Sowell mentions: the culprit is the profit makers, not the people that mandated a costly item without any stake in it. After all, the people that gave us this abomination said that they wanted to do good, so whenever things work out otherwise, it has to be someone else’s fault!
Remember that collectivism can only be made to function when it is a 2 cast system: the aristocracy and royals, and the serfs. The only equality these people can deliver constantly is equality of misery. That is not my opinion: it is history. Don’t be fooled by the temporary success some western democracies that embraced socialism have had so far either. Like California, once termed the promised land even in a prosperous US, sooner than later these socialist experiments will run out of other people’s money, and then things turn ugly. Like the frog put in water that is slowly brought to a boil, most of the sheeple will not even realize how the slow collapse of any collectivist system affects them until they are already cooked.
And don’t let any of the usual collectivists try to confuse you with that nonsense that fascism is rightwing. Acceptance by so many people that fascism isn’t just another flavor of collectivism because it was categorized as right of communism was one of the greatest snow jobs perpetrated by guilty collectivists that needed a right wing boogieman to play against the failure of communism. these totalitarian systems tend to all be left leaning. When the state dictates the economy, directly as communism where the state owns everything (well the people in charge own everything, including the life & death of the serfs) or indirectly (be it by command economies or a legal system like the one we now have in the US where government chooses winners and losers), you are dealing with collectivism. Collectivism deprives humans of their freedom and dignity, always under the pretense of doing something for the collective good, by focusing on the noble idea, but never on the results or consequences of its implementation. If these people were to be held accountable, the appeal of collectivism would have died a long time ago.