Obama Rejects Socialism Sobriquet

The truth is that Republicans, who keep pelting BO with the socialism sobriquet, have advanced the same interventionist principles, but because Republicans, pols and pundits, do not know how to define socialism, they get away with claiming their party’s Third-Way interventionism is qualitatively different to that of the Dem’s.

However, the species of socialism advanced by both parties exists on a continuum; it differs quantitatively only.

MSNBC:

President Barack Obama launched a vigorous defense of his economic agenda Wednesday, rejecting critics who call his policies “socialism” and insisting he aims to boost U.S. competitiveness abroad.

His aim He proclaim has “less to do with big government or small government than it does smart government.”

From “GOP Sticks With Karl (Marx)”:

“Strictly speaking, socialism implies state ownership of the means of economic production. But … ‘state-directed sharing of the wealth’ is also part of the socialist scheme. A scheme both Republicans and Democrats have overseen energetically and with matching commitment.

The American economic system is a mixture of free-market capitalism and socialism, with dollops of fascism added for good measure. ‘Fascism,’ wrote the Tannehills in The Market for Liberty, is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation.’ …

A great deal of this boils down to deceptive semantics—and a society that has accepted the attendant, underlying, socialistic precepts.”