…Obama is not a communist, even in the twentieth century meaning of the term. Communism is about state ownership of the means of production. The Obama administration does not seek ownership. In fact, where it acquired ownership through the bailout, the administration now works to divest itself. What Obama is building is a large government bureaucracy whose expanding limbs find their way into every facet of human existence, a government that does not own the means of production but controls them by increased and oppressive regulation and taxation. Obama’s political inspiration is more likely to be Mussolini or Peron, even Hugo Chavez, than Lenin or Stalin.
As I’ve long noted, the difference is pretty much transparent to the serfuser.
The difference is unfortunately far too opaque. Total control of an industry would at least focus accountability on the totalitarians. Byzantine rules about what owners can and can’t do with what they own can be arbitrarily similar to total control, but still allow the owners to be scapegoated for any of the controllers’ failures.
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/another-sad-example-of-mitchells-law/
Control is ownership. Deniability is simply useful to liars.
Indeed. Responsibility is also part of ownership. The regime seeks control, and a share of the profits, while evading responsibility…
What could go horribly wrong?
In other words Obama is what GW Bush was accused of being: a fascist.
…no more callers please, we HAVE a winner.
And conveniently, the word fascist has been cheapened over the years. For generations, socialists and communists have used it as an epithet against anyone they didn’t like. Nixon was a fascist, Reagan was a fascist, Bush was a fascist, and so on and so forth.
In the popular mind, a fascist is a leader who wears military uniforms, jackboots, and armbands.
But in reality, fascism is an economic system which places privately-owned business in service to the state. Mussolini conceived of it as essentially a “new, improved” version of socialism. Under fascism, politically-connected businesses thrive, while their less-connected competitors go under.
Back in the 60s, Ayn Rand said that the American economy contained elements of both socialism and fascism. She wrote an essay entitled “The Fascist New Frontier”.
No doubt about it, Obama is a straight-up fascist.
Way back in 1978, I read an article that mentioned a joke making the rounds in DC. “What’s the difference between a liberal and a fascist? A liberal doesn’t wear jackboots.” The article then went on to make the case that the joke was true. Pretty compelling stuff.
Government control but with private ownership (especially by a favored few) is the definition of Fascism.
It’s also worth noting that, again by definition, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, etc, were men of the left, not the right.
It never ceases to amaze me how many leftists don’t know (or don’t care) what “Nazi” means. It’s actually an abbreviation for Nationalsozialismus: National socialism.
Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia’s article (I know Wikipedia isn’t always acurate, but in this case they sum it up accurately and concisely) about Nazi economics.
“Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be “productive” rather than “parasitical”. Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals then the state could nationalize it.”
Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? And I don’t mean this just in reference to Obama (Though it sure fits him). The seizure of private property to hand over to developers, as established by the Kelo case, is absolutely classic Nazi economics.
The full name was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
In English: National Socialist German Workers Party.
It’s also amusing to listen to them try and split hairs when differentiating between communism and fascism. Sure, there were differences but they were relatively minor compared to the similarities.
Um, wrong. In many ways fascism & communism are parallel, but they are orthogonal to each other in an equal number of ways.
It amazes me how many people toss off a remark to the effect that liberals don’t understand where the word “Nazi” came from, while they are equally ignorant of the non-existence of socialism both in Nazism and Fascism. Hint: the tiny minority who took the term “national socialist” where murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. Ditto for Mussolini; he included a labor in his corporatist structure, but business owners still held all the cards. The working man was strictly controlled.
Another sore point for me -along the lines of people calling magazines “clips” and conflating baud with bits per second- is the insistence of using the broken paradigm of left vs. right. That’s been invalid since the end of the 18th century. It was only valid during Louis’ rule as a “constitutional” sovereign, when the order of delegates entered the chamber in order of adherence to the King. Those who desired the greatest change were set furthest from him, while those who were most faithful to monarchy were set to his right hand.
As Jerry Pournelle and others have pointed out, this arrangement quickly morphed into “The Mountain,” wherein precedence was defined by how high you sat in the seats.
There is no single variable by which one may define a spectrum of “right” vs. “left,” so using those terms is literally nonsense. Among other absurdities, it allows one to make remarks to the effect that all totalitarian movements originate from the “left,” even though you can’t differentiate between right & left.
That’s not to mention that Obama is clearly a Progressive. It’s no more a euphemism for liberal (or fascist, or socialist) than libertarian is a euphemism for conservative, and once you accept that identification it’s easy to trace the progress (excuse the pun) of the Progressive movement over the past century. In fact Rand published a very nice article on the movement last year which informed me of more-recent changes in the ideology which made it more totalitarian and anti-democratic.
But, sadly, no, President Barry isn’t a fascist. Or a Fascist. Or a commie. In fact he loves himself some big-corporation business, as long as they contribute to the party. And they come & go by the back door so the tools don’t notice. :-/
The argument that “socialism can’t be fascist because true socialism is international” is kind of like arguing that Daimler Chrysler wasn’t a German company.
The exec’s quip in response to pronouncing the company’s name — “The ‘Chrysler’ is silent.” — said it all.