In this piece Professor Steven Horwitz argues that we shouldn’t call Obama a socialist, since he has not (yet, at least) called for government takeover of the means of production. Instead, Horwitz says that a better label would be “corporatist” or “economic fascist.”
Horwitz is responding to a silly piece by AEI’s Norman Ornstein, who said it was a “smear” to call Obama a socialist. Ornstein thinks he’s a “pragmatic centrist.” What a useless non-description that is!
Although Obama has not come right out and declared that he’s in favor of a “single producer” economic system to match his 2003 statement that he wants a “single payer” health care system (Obamacare is, I think, designed to reach that goal by successive approximations), we shouldn’t discount the possibility that he really is in favor of complete socialism and just doesn’t want to admit it. All we KNOW is that Obama believes in a great deal of governmental power to control society; whether or not he’d want to extend that control as far as Marx and Lenin wanted or believes that somewhat more freedom is beneficial is something we don’t know.
