Re: Socialism For Dummies or: Why Obama Isn't a Communist, Marxist, or Socialist

What is Socialism? Does the word apply to Obama?
September 14, 2009
by Jeffrey Tucker

The New York Times offers a very funny look at the new fashion for calling Obama a socialist and investigates this issue as if the phenomenon is a strange linguistic invasion that requires the expertise of a psychoanalyst.

Hence, the first expert to weigh in chalks the use of the word up to "unconscious anxieties about modernity."

Where are the tomatoes to hurl at this history prof?

So on it goes with the sole exception of Steven Hayward who inches closer toward a realistic analysis, though he repeats that story about Mises leaving the Mont Pelerin Society in disgust at the direction the debate was taking (as I recall from the actual history, how to get the government more revenue through tax shifting).

Look, this subject is not complicated. More government control leads toward socialism; less government control leads away from socialism. In addition, there are both left-wing and right-wing forms of socialism. Why is calling Obama a socialist considered so wicked? Didn't the left often call Bush a Nazi, which means national socialist?