'Barack Obama Is a Socialist!'

Earlier in this year's campaign, back when it seemed certain that Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic nominee, I wrote a post titled, "Hillary Clinton is a Socialist!" That article looked at what was then the biggest insult the GOP was leveling at the New York senator. To many of Clinton's detractors, her proposal for universal health care smacked of a Stalinist plot, and provided all the ideological rationale required to oppose her.

Well, of late, Barack Obama has taken over Clinton's dubious title. Now, he's the one accused of being the socialist. You hear it from Sarah Palin and the legion of McCain supporters on blogs like this one. Obama is a socialist, socialism is evil, therefore Obama is evil. Of course, this formulation -- as if cut and pasted from a book by Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity -- leaves out several relevant aspects of the continuum that describes the difference between pure laisse faire capitalism and the Maoist corruption of Karl Marx's worker's collective.

First of all, we need to get over our silly notions of philosophical purity. In no small part, we are, in the United States, living in a system that is beholden to socialist ideas. When we "provide for the common defense," we are stepping in that direction. When we levy taxes to help improve state and federal roads, we're flirting with the red menace. When we regulate pollution, enact child-labor laws, or provide protection for Americans with disabilities, we curtail the ravenous impulses of an unfettered capitalist state in favor of the greater good. Of course, Palin herself was guilty of spreading the wealth when she instituted a much-reviled (by corporations) windfall profits tax that lined the pockets of the residents of her state.



None of this, by the way, is to deny the evils of government power run amok. Many of America's negative associations with socialism are wholly justified. One need only look back at Cultural-Revolution-era China and the Stalinist brutality of the former Soviet Union to see how the best-laid collectivist plans can quickly spiral out of control. But we must not let ourselves believe that we are, in any way, living out some untainted version of capitalism. As recent events in the financial and mortgage sectors have shown, to some degree, we're all socialists now.

The rap that posits Obama as socialist is fairly straightforward. He wants to raise taxes on the rich, and give the middle and lower classes tax cuts. For some of his critics, that Robin Hood plan represents an unthinkable "redistribution of the wealth." Fair enough. What's silly, however, is that these same people often don't call out John McCain for his $300 billion mortgage buyout plan. In any other election, that idea would be laughed off the Republican stage as collectivism writ large. It's even too far left for Obama's liking.

In fact, the corrective currently at play in the form of massive government bailouts that both McCain and Obama have voted for, can be seen as the logical result of what happens when capitalism is given too long of a leash. As yet more proof, witness today's news that Freddie Mac paid off Republican lawmakers to kill regulatory restrictions. And yes, there's blame for Democrats in all this, too. But the fundamentally faulty premise that has sent us running off this cliff is that the market always knows best. If that were true, then we'd still have 9 year-olds working 18-hour-days on the assembly line, and the Clean Air Act would sound like yet another order from Big Brother.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with taking issue with Obama's tax plan. Many smart, sensible people do just that. But to fire off a charge of "socialism" without bothering to examine the very socialist landscape in which we now live is, I'd suggest, a tad disingenuous.