Alana on March 13, 2009 at 11:13 PM

It’s not an issue of being afraid to use those words, but instead an issue of using them in a willy nilly way that makes it impossible for people to take them seriously when it actually happens.

For example, let’s say 2 years from now Obama decides that it’s time to nationalize the means of production, starts handing down governmentally mandated 5 year plans, and forcing everyone to work at a governmentally mandated wage at risk of imprisonment on the collective farms. Then all of these people who’ve been calling him a Marxist since the campaign come out and say “See? I told you, he’s a Marxist” to which the economically uneducated respond “Whatever, you said the stimulus was socialist, you said the temporary nationalization of the banks as recommended by Alan Greenspan were socialist, why should I believe you now?”

Point being that when the terms “socialist” and “Marxist” are used for the sake of demagoguery, they lose their meaning in practical application. There are a plurality of different economic systems that deviate from free market capitalism, there’s corporatism, mercantilism, the welfare state, mixed economies, all of these deviating significantly from free market capitalism and none of them can be accurately referred to as “Marxism” or “Socialism”. Believing in wealth redistribution is not inherently Marxist, as most economic systems have some degree of wealth redistribution, hell, if you have a government you have wealth redistribution, period. If I make a million dollars and you make five thousand dollars, even if we pay a flat tax rate of 10% I’ve paid $100,000 and you’ve paid $500, presuming we get the same quality of defense from the police and the military, I’ve just paid a lot more for the same thing you got for $500, I’m paying for your policing and military defense. Marxism and socialism refer to initially centrally controlled means of production, and subsequently centrally controlled wages and rations. It’s not wealth redistribution, it’s wealth distribution, as no one has any wealth unless the state gives it to them.

President Obama might be a Marxist, but he is yet to pursue Marxist policies, and if he ever does pursue Marxist policies and people don’t believe those calling him out on it because they’ve been calling him a Marxist for years we’re all going to look very stupid. There’s no need to go to the demagogic, call it what it is, bad economic policy. Say he’s destroying private capital, that he’d meddling and subsequently screwing everything up, that he’s leading us right back into stagflation and that he’s just extending the recession while simultaneously guaranteeing it’s going to have to get worse because of the anti-inflationary measures his choices are necessitating in the future. He’s extending Bush’s economic policies, he’s doing more of exactly the same stuff that got us in this hole in the first place, and what he’s doing is bad enough without having to label it something that it isn’t.

philwynk on March 13, 2009 at 10:36 PM

Gotta say I don’t buy it. There’s no reason to snub Brazil. These sorts of things are screw ups, nothing more. Taking matters of state seriously, bending over backwards to make sure you don’t offend anyone with anything other than policy, these are matters of free capital. It costs us almost nothing to make sure the Brazilian state officials feel respected, spelling his name right, not putting quotes around his legal name, etc. this is stuff that can be done with a quick Wikipedia search. This stuff has to get done because it can make everything a lot easier, or, if screwed up, it makes it a lot harder. We have interests at stake in Brazil, and there’s no possible benefit in pissing them off just for the sake of pissing them off. The last thing we need is to alienate potential allies in Latin America, especially when talking about one of the states that is one of the closest to a market economy in a region that has been turning extremely socialist recently.

It’s a disaster because he doesn’t have the people in place to catch this stuff. I don’t think anyone expects President Obama to know this protocol stuff himself, but Rahm Emanuel certainly should know most of it, and everyone else should at least know when the protocol people at the State Dept. should be called in. And they don’t, and that scares me, because an administration that squanders international political capital in exchange for absolutely nothing is FAR more dangerous than a President like Bush who could be said to have had an overly ambition foreign agenda.

galenrox on March 16, 2009 at 9:35 AM