While arguing with liberals – friends and otherwise – about Obamacare, I’ve noticed that while most of them are very poorly-informed about much of what is actually in whatever bills are currently in contention, many of them are crystal-clear on at least one key chanting point:

“It’s not socialism!”

And they’re more or less correct, at the moment, if and only if you observe exactly one, excessively restrictive dictionary definition of “socialism”.

But, in practical, real-world terms, there really are two definitions.

I will try to explain these definitions with real-world examples.  However, as the real-world examples use a few historical terms that tend, shall we say, to inflame conversation and serve as red blankets before bulls, I’ll change the names of those terms to keep things on an even keel and focus on the actual policy and mechanical differences between the two definitions.

Example 1:

Promising that they will make life easier and more tenable to the people, the Bommunist party abolishes private enterprise and makes all businesses state-owned.

These state-owned businesses, answerable only to centralized state planning agencies – operating in what economists call a “command economy” – are utterly divorced from the free market, and produce entirely based on political imperatives from above, rather than market demands from all around them.  Also, absent any of the discipline of the free market, productivity plummets.  Eventually, the system becomes unable to sustain any sort of economic activity.

Example 2:

Promising to make life easier and more tenable for the people, the National Bocialist Party (*) also realizes unfettered free enterprise is a threat to its control – but has learned something from ten years of watching the Bommunist Party flounder and fail.

So the National Bocialists decide to keep the “best” (for their purposes) of the free market – the expertise and disclipline of capitalist businesses and their owners – but put them under centralized control scarcely less complete than that of the Bommunists.  The ideal, of course, was to keep the outward appearances of capitalism and avoid the worst failures of full government ownership – but to make it essentially impossible for industry to do anything other than what government mandated.

(Data on the National Bocialist system fades out after about 12 years, but preliminary results weren’t all that encouraging for anything other than artificial bubbles in things government needed in huge numbers quickly, like – again, hypothetically – Banzers, Bukas and Boo Boats).

Again – the Bommunists and the National Bocialists are completely hypothetical, and any similarities to political parties that existed in the real world is purely concidental.

Except for their economics.

So is Obamacare socialist?

As it is being considered today?  How is Obamacare, with its thin, unconvincing veener of “marketiness”, different from the (utterly hypothetical) Example 2, above?

Why, no – it’s not a completely original idea…

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 10:15 am and is filed under Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.