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.

Pelosi Misleads and Misinforms Again

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is misleading and misinforming us once again. She recently complained that she has been met by angry mobs of people displaying swastika signs. She was clearly trying to create the impression that the protesters were Nazis.

The economist John Lott has a blog here, which makes interesting reading. On this issue, he requested a picture from Nancy Pelosi's office showing the crowd waving swastikas. The picture they sent him showed one swastika and it was superimposed with a red circle with a diagonal crossing line. Clearly, the protester was protesting fascism, not promoting it. The picture Nancy Pelosi's office sent John Lott is shown on his blog.

Nothing makes a socialist angrier than to be identified with fascism and Nazism. Yet, this is the most common form that socialism takes in America today. To be sure, there are still many who favor communism and there are still more who mix the two forms of socialism liberally.

So, Nancy Pelosi just cannot help but to embellish the truth until it takes on the form of a lie. Her accusations against the CIA were not enough to even teach her the least bit of restraint. But, what can you expect of a committed socialist? All of socialism is built upon a foundation of lies. They have no choice but to lie. It is their nature to use lies and ever bigger lies to achieve power over their fellow man.