If Government Does Not Own the Entire Health Care Industry, Is it Socialism?

Obama snorts and laughs when he talks of how some accuse him of being a socialist.  He does not say he is not a socialist.  He just acts dismissively.  Sometimes he says that he does not seek to have the government own everything.  Since WWII, American socialists have been keen to define socialism as the ownership of all of the means of production and all property.  A once well-known socialist said:

Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. … It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. …
It gives us also a special, secret pleasure to see how the people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.

 These are the words of a Nazi closely associated with Adolf Hitler.  The quote is from Hermann Rauschning (1940), The Voice Of Destruction, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.  As I have noted many times, socialism is control of the people for collectivist reasons and as you can see here, Rauschning makes it very clear why socialism does not need the outright ownership of all property.  In fact, he makes it very clear that his socialism is all the more cunning and actually all the more enslaving.  If naive people still think they own something, the state has a much greater means for extorting from them and they are more motivated to do as required.

Paul Cohen referred me to a post in Ron Pisaturo's Blog, which had this quote and an interesting discussion of Obama and socialism.