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:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness…neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are, as a rule, weakened by the provision of assistance — where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks — the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supercede [sic] it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

When Hayek wrote that in 1943, the world had little experience with health insurance at all, much less with market provision of health insurance. Today, we have lots of experience with the former and enough experience with the latter to know that markets “can make adequate provision” of health insurance for more than just a “few individuals.” In 1943, Hayek and his contemporaries also knew little about how health insurance affects the incidence of health “losses.” Today, we have lots of evidence to show that moral hazard is real and — as Hayek would predict — governments have only the bluntest of tools for dealing with it. Finally, universal-coverage schemes have come to consume such considerable shares of workers’ earnings, as well as other aspects of individual self-determination, that it is implausible to suggest that socialized medicine is compatible with individual freedom.

In short, Hayek was wrong here. (So much for the whole “bible” thing.) Even if Hayek were right, that wouldn’t make Obama’s health plan any less reliant on centralized planning — i.e., any less socialist.

“Another champion of healthcare socialism,” writes Lind, ”was the late Milton Friedman, [who] proposed that major costs be paid for by mandatory catastrophic healthcare coverage run by the federal government.” Lind cites Friedman’s support of a Negative Income Tax as further evidence of Friedman’s socialist tendencies. 

Unlike Lind’s claims about Hayek, this is just silly. Friedman offered those ideas as second-best alternatives to prominent proposals that were far more socialist — some of which had already been enacted (socialized medicine for the elderly, the expanding welfare state) and some of which merely seemed inevitable (socialized medicine for all). Anyone looking for Friedman’s true preferences need only consult Free To Choose (which he coauthored with his wife Rose):

In our opinion, there is no case whatsoever for socialized medicine. On the contrary, government already plays too large a role in medical care. Any further expansion of its role would be very much against the interests of patients, physicians, and health care personnel.

Since Obama would vastly expand the federal government’s role in health care, I think we can guess where the Friedmans stand.

Lastly, Lind gets nasty:

McCain’s last-minute clarion call is really a racial “dog whistle.” The McCain campaign may appear to be debating public philosophy, when in fact it is making a disguised appeal to white racism. If that is the case, then “redistributionist” and “socialist” may be intended to be understood by white swing voters as code words that function the way that “welfare queen” did for the Reagan campaign. A “socialist” or “redistributionist” is a politician who taxes white people like Joe the Plumber and gives money to … you know who.

Does Lind mean to suggest that voicing opposition to “socialist” policies, “redistribution,” and “spreading the wealth around” is necessarily racist? If not, then is there any way an anti-socialist could say such things without Lind suspecting him of racism? Or of race-baiting?

And what’s with this eagerness to impute evil motives to those who disagree with you? That’s so … McCain-esque.