Much of President Obama?s agenda has been described as socialist, a charge hotly disputed by many of his supporters.
But Kevin D. Williamson?s new Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism describes how the shoe fits ? especially when the topic is federal health care reform.
Williamson also explains how socialists of all stripes go wrong:
?In the United States health care is a big business commodity with a big price tag, comprising 14% of the US GNP. Removing profit from the Wall Street-controlled health industry can fully fund a system that puts health before profit.? That?s from the 2010 party program of the Communist Party of the United States of America, ? but it could as easily have come from the mouth of Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi.
For our current purposes, it is sufficient to note that all the central planners ? from Marx himself to Lenin to Wilson?s rationalizers to the CPUSA to the health care crusaders ? see profit as something extraneous and exogenous to the economy, by which we mean the process by which goods and services are created, developed, and delivered. Profit, under all these models, inhibits efficiency and the rational distribution of goods, services, and capital.
The truth is precisely the opposite: the search for profit and the competition it leads to are what create efficiency and police the rational deployment of resources.
