As a Libertarian I am sometimes criticized, or envied — most often the former — for having a political philosophy that allows me to criticize the Left and the Right. I concede it does confer a certain flexibility at cocktail parties, where party goers often segregate into cliques along political ideology. I’m welcomed in all of them, especially when the dialog turns to carping about the policies of the Other Side. Carping comes easy to libertarians, mostly because government policies continue to provide us such a fertile substrate for our complaints.
Anyhoo, this morning I’d like to add my voice to the complaint concerning the oft-heard shibboleth from the Right, namely, “Obama is a socialist.”
As the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reminds us, you think Obama is a socialist? You ain’t seen real socialism dude, like, for instance, twentieth century Czechoslovakia.
It’s like people who point to real bad poverty in the Ozarks, and you want to ask these people if they’ve ever been to, say, the slums of Guatemala City. Or the hills outside Port-au-Prince. I admit no familiarity with the former, though a friend of mine has multiple times gone to lend his assistance rebuilding the latter, and confirms the deprivation there.
Back to the POTUS being a socialist, consider this from another (nominally libertarian) voice, Fred Reed:
Next, why do the cognitively challenged say that Obama is a socialist? The man is an arch-conservative. (I’m not sure what arches have to do with it, but never mind.) He bailed out Wall Street, the beating heart of predatory capitalism, and then carefully didn’t prosecute those who masterminded the sub-prime scan. Socialists hate Wall Street. Obama breast-feeds it. And he sends the military to bomb every country he has heard of, which is very conservative. He is ideally qualified to be president of Guatemala.