James Carville’s own poll says that 55% of the American people think that Barack Obama is a socialist.
I was amazed last night to see that even the clueless Bill O’Reilly has figured it out. “Spread the wealth around” wasn’t enough for him, but appointing someone to head up Medicare who says that it’s wealth redistribution was apparently the last straw.
Wait, Obama is
blacka socialist?! When did that happen?I think it happened, Titus, when Uncle Frank gave young Barry a copy of DAS KAPITAL FOR KIDS as an Eid Ul-Fitr present.
appointing someone to head up Medicare who says that it’s wealth redistribution
Not knowing that Medicare is an example of wealth redistribution (from the younger to the older and sicker) should disqualify one from any post having to do with healthcare.
So who doesn’t know that Medicare is wealth restribution? Bill O’Reilly? I already knew it is. I’m pretty sure Rand already knew it is.
All government programs are wealth redistribution. By definition you could say. Which is why government should not be given responsibility over anything more than what was the founders intent.
So who doesn’t know that Medicare is wealth restribution?
Rand cites Berwick acknowledging this trivial fact as “the last straw.” Apparently someone was surprised and and shocked by the obvious.
Noooo, we’ve all been saying this was a socialist wealth redistribution scheme and everyone on the left has been calling us crazy fear mongers for making that claim. It’s only now that Barack appointments (without confirmation) someone who so brazenly proclaims it as a redistribution scheme that now has the left say, “that Medicare [reform] is an example of wealth redistribution”. We’ve never been at war with Eastasia; we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. That proverbial straw that’s breaking the camel’s back, Jim, is this being the latest in a long string of dismal facts being dug out from this appalling piece of health reform legislation.
According to Mike Moore, people voted for him for exactly that reason.
55% of the American people think that Barack Obama is a socialist
You say it like it is such a dirty word. Then again the world liberal has also turned into a dirty word in politics today, and is applied with wildly different meanings by people on both sides of the spectrum anyway, so why bother?
There are a number of much more socialist countries than the US that are reasonably fiscally responsible (unlike the US) and which have higher average per capita incomes than the US. With good economic management, prosperity can be a fairly soft function of capitalism/socialism within the mid range.
It is not that the Obama administration are more socialist as such that is the main problem, but that they are also incredibly incompetent at it.
But socialist *is* a dirty word! I basically use it as a curse.
“Rand cites Berwick acknowledging this trivial fact”
Hardly trivial, immaterial perhaps to fellow travelers like you but not trivial.
Socialist, hell. I think he’s a Communist.
Socialism is bad for poor people, middle class people and rich people. It’s not a dirty word, but generally it does show the socialist in question doesn’t understand economics well enough to govern optimally. That’s if Obama is a socialist because he believes in it. If Obama is a socialist because it’s popular, well isn’t that the reason Byrd joined the Klan?
Yours,
Tom
From my reading the only person surprised was Bill O’Reilly, and he was surprised not be the fact the Medicare is a redistribution program, but rather that Berwick came out and acknowledged it in a straightforward manner.
Unfortunately, it’s not soon enough to spare us a lot of suffering. The plan is for tax increases to start next year. And I still don’t see a real leader coming from the right.
Tom, yes I’m sure all the poor people in socialist Europe are looking fondly at the US and wishing they were a poor American.
There are a number of much more socialist countries than the US that are reasonably fiscally responsible (unlike the US) and which have higher average per capita incomes than the US.
No, there aren’t.
You say it like it is such a dirty word.
That’s because it is. In 1910 it was not intellectually disreputable to believe that socialism might offer a “better way.” After the bloody century of intervening history since, in 2010, this belief has been amply demonstrated to be bollocks. Those who still adhere to it do so out of a religious-level conviction that is as dismissive of demonstrable reality as the beliefs of young Earth creationists or snake handlers.
“Tom, yes I’m sure all the poor people in socialist Europe are looking fondly at the US and wishing they were a poor American.”
But why is it that more people want to come here? Until recently, about January of 2009, they had a better chance at not being poor here. We had less union influence keeping them out of the job market, better growth and less restrictions on start ups.
Indeed, it has a body count of over a hundred million. Facts are inconvenient things.
Yet you easily forget the millions who died in the Irish potato famine due to misguided free trade and private property policies. If you take it as a percentage of population, perhaps the difference between “socialist” and “capitalist” mismanagement deaths may not be as different as you may think.
Both of these mismanagements (Ireland, Soviet Union) happened at a time cheap food from the country was required to feed the nascent industry in the cities.
There are socialist schemes which do not involve 100% directly planned economies and totalitarian regimes. All successful economies today are mixed with planned and market elements.
The problem with planning in the US is that you seem to have forgotten how to do planning.
I remember seeing poor people sleeping in park benches during the day, and warming themselves burning trash during the night, when I went to the US, so I do not know why the hell you feel so proud about your social system. I remember walking across one main street during the night and over half the people in the street were basically doing that. I was flabbergasted to say the least. Never saw that even in my trips to Eastern Europe.
You mean due to the Corn Laws, ‘zilla.
Dunham’s not a socialist; he’s an incompetent puppet. His puppeteers aren’t socialists; they’re brutal thugs. In fact, no one in power for more than five minutes has been a socialist; it only takes that long to realize, If I send the committed activists to the gulag, I can keep all this loot for myself…
If you take it as a percentage of population, perhaps the difference between “socialist” and “capitalist” mismanagement deaths may not be as different as you may think.
In the very narrow sense that both the British Crown and Uncle Joe Stalin would just as soon that the victims of their engineered famines not be around to cause trouble anymore, you have a sort of point. Free-markets and capitalism had nothing to do with the Irish Potato Famine though. A mercantilist monarchy did. They were the “planners” of their day. Others here have already pojnted you in the direction of knowledge on this subject. Go. Learn. Achieve wisdom.
All successful economies today are mixed with planned and market elements.
True, in a sense. However it is the market aspects that create the success and the statist “planning” that militates in the other direction. Until the advent of the Obama administration and his legion of academic aspirational Europeans, the U.S. was able to counteract the dead weight of its parasitic “planned” sectors with its vibrant free-market sector. Now, not so much. We are in serious danger of tipping irretrievably into a death-spiriling Euro-extinction trajectory.
This is why you need to define “successful” with some precision. If, by this term, you mean an economy that provides an increase in living standards over time in a sustainable way, then the only arguably succesful economy today is that of the U.S. – at least in its pre-Obama form.
As you will readily find with a negligible bit of research, the nations of Western Europe have “planned” themselves into an irreversible decline that will see their economies, their populations and their continued existences come to a ragged and unpleasant end within a century or so.
The essence of the past 60 years of European “planning” is fairly simple. They have “planned” to throw a big going-out-business party and deliberately eat all of their cultural and economic seed corn, then make up for the empty coffers that will inevitably result by failing to reproduce themselves.
If the planning was perfect, the last living European would spend his last subsidy check on his own funeral and everything would wind up very neatly indeed. I fear the actual end will be appreciably less tidy and pleasant.
But if you are, by chance, an actual European – the way you express yourself makes it apparent you’re not an American – you’ll probably be dead by the time things get really dire; always excepting the possibility that you’re young enough now to still be alive when the Muslims come for you to hasten matters along. Pray to Allah they “plan” to make it quick.
The problem with planning in the US is that you seem to have forgotten how to do planning.
More like never ginned up a sufficientlly well-developed delusion that it would actually work.
I remember seeing poor people sleeping in park benches during the day, and warming themselves burning trash during the night, when I went to the US, so I do not know why the hell you feel so proud about your social system. I remember walking across one main street during the night and over half the people in the street were basically doing that. I was flabbergasted to say the least. Never saw that even in my trips to Eastern Europe.
No, I should imagine not. In Eastern Europe – and even Western Europe, to be fair – you are not encumbered by left-wing city administrations that believe the deranged and the profoundly addicted have a “right” to be free from involuntary confinement and treatment. This, again, is something that owes nothing to free-market economics but to a “de-instituionalization” movement that was the product of exactly the kind of academic left-wing know-it-all-ism that also believes it should be in charge of “planning” the lives of the rest of us. No thanks.
mismanagement deaths
…happen under many different systems of government. People suffer needlessly when government regulates. Don’t confuse capitalism with free enterprise.
“…property rights [are] a key link in a chain of events which enable people without property to generate wealth for themselves and for the whole society. One implication of this is that some Third World countries could gain the use of more capital by making property rights more accessible within their own borders than by a ten-fold increase in the amount of foreign aid they receive.” – ‘Applied Economics’ pg.246
Sowell goes on to point out that while people think of property being for the rich it is the poor that suffer the most where property is tied up by government mismanagement. Socialism taking property from private owners being an example.
Yeah, Stalin’s deliberate starvation of the Ukranians was mere “mismanagement.”
There’s simply no discussion with people intent on destroying language and thereby concepts and thought.
Yes Titus, that’s a distinction that needs to be front and center. While much can be attributed to stupidity, it’s important to identify evil intent and keep our powder dry.