At Salon.com, Michael Lind asks and answers, "Is Barack Obama a socialist? If he is, then so is John McCain." I have to agree. McCain so often plays the class warrior that his "desperate use of the socialist smear is particularly shameless." I might add that McCain is giving anti-socialism a bad name by associating it with hypocrisy, anger, piety, trigger-happiness, etc.
But I can't go as far as Lind, who doesn't really seem interested in the answer to his own question. Indeed, it appears Lind's purpose is to teach McCain the true meaning of shameless. Lind writes:
McCain and Palin claim that Obama's proposed healthcare system is socialist. It is nothing of the sort. It is a variant of the employer-friendly, insurance-friendly "play-or-pay" scheme discussed in the 1990s. Employers will be given the choice of providing tax-favored health insurance to their employees or being taxed to support a public insurance system. Over time the latter might expand, but for the foreseeable future our dysfunctional private insurance system will survive.
I'm sorry, but the fact that Obama would preserve private health insurance says absolutely nothing about whether his health-care plan is socialist. (If your jaw just hit the space bar, you probably need to read my paper, "Does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine?") The Church of Universal Coverage loves pointing to the presence of "private" health care because it distracts attention from what they're really doing.
Lind further attempts to innoculate Obama from the charge of socialism by associating the candidate with that great anti-socialist Friedrich Hayek. Lind describes Hayek's Road to Serfdom as "the bible of free-market libertarians," and refers to the part where Hayek writes:
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