Quote:
Originally Posted by jviehe
My point was that socialism is a economic policy designed to equalize the difference between ability and need. Everyone in the US has the same need for physical security from foreign threat. Everyone contributes equally by virtue of being a citizen. You could almost say the military is a communist institution rather than socialist. But I dont it fits into any mold.
Im willing to accept it being socialist or not, however. Thats not the point here. The point is that Obamas plan for Healthcare is to follow the marxist socialist economic policy that the industry should be nationalized and its resources distributed based on need, not ability. Capitalism is a doctor and a patient negotiating a trade. Socialism is the govt forcing the doctor to work based on how much the patient needs the product.
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It sounds more as if you object to Obama's phrasing of what is occurring than the specific paradigm. For instance, your statement that "everyone contributes equally by virtue of being a citizen", used in defense of some government provided service, sounds about as Marxist as you can get. But, I don't think that you actually believe in the virtue of any principles, per se, that would be described as "Marxist". And, generally speaking, I think that you tend to favor free market principles more than most, even on the Republican side of the aisle.
But there is an inherent problem here in trying to pin the 150 year old philosophies of the market at the time to current markets and policy. Everything about our economy is "managed market" wherein all westernized nations have abandoned the feudal or anarcho-capitalist market and adopted managed economies which are manage to varying degrees. And, what we're talking about here is whether or not to slightly increase the amount of management, in this case or in cases like reducing taxes or privatizing a chunk of social security, whether to decrease it. In the eyes of Marx, squabbling over whether or not to toss the proletariat a bone of shitty government healthcare would be irrelevant and probably offensive - his principle sticking point was the idea of "wage slavery" and entrenched class immobility.
These problems do not exist as they did in the days of Marx (or in Czarist Russia), nor do solutions for them, as a matter of course. Instead, in a relatively stable, managed market economy, we've seen only mild vacillations between regulation and de-regulation, and we seem to be (predictably, with the Democrats) heading for a period of mildly increased regulation. And, that's it.
It seems unlikely to me that people's actual concern is the nationalizing of some service - there is plenty of precedence for that already and no great objection. I think it's more the fact that it comes packaged from the Democrats with a (falsely) populist message and that it tends to pander to what a lot on the GOP side of the aisle call "class warfare". But, I suspect that this is an instance of the Democrats not practicing what they preach. In short, I don't think that Obama is offering up a proletariat owned bureaucracy that distributes according to need. I think it far more likely that this will result in shuffling money from some members of the proletariat to other members of the proletariat, while lining the pockets of some bourgeoisie interest and creating the illusion of populism.
Edit: I should also offer that I don't support the nationalization of industry, nor do I think that it's current existence justifies doing it with more things. I'm saying what I'm saying here merely to point out that whatever Obama may be doing is more "business as usual" than "proletarian revolution".