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Contradiction: Conservatives oppose Healthcare Reform because it's socialist.

Richard Masters

Illuminator
Richard Masters
Joined
Dec 27, 2007
Messages
3,031
Obama is a socialist because he wants to steal your money to pay doctors for the health of others.

Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are socialist because they want to steal your money to pay soldiers for protection of others.

I don't want my hard-earned money to be spent protecting Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh from foreign threats.
 
I say something similiar to conservatives who give me an anti-tax argument. Though I usually form it in the phrase of a question.
 
Also, Medicaid, Medicare and troop insurance are okay. But government-run healthcare? That's a nightmare.
 
Dorian Gray said:
Also, Medicaid, Medicare and troop insurance are okay. But government-run healthcare? That's a nightmare.
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Something like that. Troop insurance is an especially good point; however most conservatives I know don't approve of Medicaid, Medicare or SS.
 
Most conservatives agree with the basic principle that some form of government is necessary for people to thrive in community with each other.

Most conservatives agree with the basic principle that at least a minimal provision for national defense is one of the things for which government is necessary.

So far, so good. Nobody except extremist libertarians and anarchists would argue that any form of government at all, or any duty of government at all, is unacceptably close to socialism. Certainly most conservatives don't argue this.

What most conservatives that I know do argue is that a certain amount of government is a necessary evil, and that for the overall well-being of the governed, its activities should be limited to things that can't really be handled effectively in any other way. Individuals rather than local governments. Local governments rather than regional governments. Regional governments rather than national governments. National governments rather than one-world governments. Etc.

So an expansion of national government into healthcare is offensive to conservatives because it's an expansion of national government. Obviously some amount of national healthcare programs are probably necessary, just like some amount of national defense programs are probably necessary. And conservatives debate amongst themselves all the time just where these thresholds should be.

It's not inconsistent for conservatives to accept a certain amount of government as a necessary evil, but still be opposed to what they believe is excessive or unnecessary expansion of government.

The conservatives I know are also more wary of grand or sweeping social experimentation. They would prefer incremental changes, piecemeal and local, than can easily be experimented with and reversed or modified if they prove flawed (which they almost always do--another conservative principle).

Call it socialism if you like. Or statism. Or fascism. The increasing involvement of government in more and more aspects of daily life. The increasing synergy between government and industry. These are valid concerns, and ones conservatives can--and do!--certainly raise in a nuanced manner.

What I don't understand is, why do progressives object to socialism? Is there something wrong with socialism? Isn't Obama's healthcare reform a step in the right direction? A step towards nationalized healthcare and a more socialist system of government?

Shouldn't progressives be proud of Obama's socialist tendencies? Far from objecting to the characterization, shouldn't progressives be explaining that Obama's policies are good precisely because they are socialist?

Indeed, as far as I can tell, the real complaint about calling Obama socialist is that he's not very socialist--probably because American society as a whole is not very enthusiastic about socialism. That is, he'd be much more socialist, if he thought he could get away with it

Since he can't get away with it, I think progressives would rather he remained a crypto-socialist, which unfortunately he can't do while advancing a socialist agenda. Hence the pretty fiction that "socialist" is a bad word that can't possibly be used to describe Obama's policies without also describing every other aspect of government ever.
 
"Progressives" cant be proud of Obama's "socialist tendencies" because he has no socialist tendencies.

Obama is even to the right of the swiss SVP, the most right wing party we have in government.
 
theprestige said:
Shouldn't progressives be proud of Obama's socialist tendencies? Far from objecting to the characterization, shouldn't progressives be explaining that Obama's policies are good precisely because they are socialist?
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Until the government owns the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, employs the doctors and nurses directly, etc, then it's not socialism.

Socialism, by definition, is when the government owns the means of production.

The health care bill isn't any more socialist than the Alaska oil royalties are, and those claiming it is are every bit as clueless as those who claimed Alaska is socialist because of the oil royalties.
 
DC said:
"Progressives" cant be proud of Obama's "socialist tendencies" because he has no socialist tendencies.
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correct. I am proud of Obama's liberal-progressive tendencies, and his social-democratic tendencies.
 
WildCat said:
Until the government owns the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, employs the doctors and nurses directly, etc, then it's not socialism.

Socialism, by definition, is when the government owns the means of production.

The health care bill isn't any more socialist than the Alaska oil royalties are, and those claiming it is are every bit as clueless as those who claimed Alaska is socialist because of the oil royalties.
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So if it's not full-blown socialism, it can't possibly have socialist characteristics?

And it's impossible to trend towards full-blown socialism? You have to implement it all at once, overnight?

I wonder how that plays at History Department cocktail parties. "Well, prior to 1922, Lenin wasn't really socialist at all. You see, he hadn't actually implemented a fully-socialist form of government yet."

But actually I get your point.

Personally, I prefer the term "statist", expressing an increasing expansion of government into more and more areas of private activity. Socialism, as defined, would be an ideal consummation of a statist program.

Is Obama a statist? I think so. I think he quite clearly would prefer to implement as many statist policies as he thinks he can get away with. Which, as DC points out, isn't very many compared to other countries (though DC then promptly draws all kinds of silly conclusions from this comparison).
 
theprestige said:
So if it's not full-blown socialism, it can't possibly have socialist characteristics?
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Every administration has had "socialist characteristics" yet only the Obama administration is being called socialist. Remember the Resolution Trust Corporation created in the H.W. Bush administration? Were there calls of socialism when the RTC seized the assets of hundreds troubled savings and loans and resold them to investors at a tax payer cost of over $100 million?
 
Dorian Gray said:
"Million"? lol
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Sorry about that, I'm sick today. I think the total in the end was $120 billion.

Also imagine what the tea baggers would do if Obama tried to pull off a similar version of Ronald Reagan's 1982 socialist illegal immigration amnesty law.
 
Alt+F4 said:
Also imagine what the tea baggers would do if Obama tried to pull off a similar version of Ronald Reagan's 1982 socialist illegal immigration amnesty law.
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Is there a world where this line of reasoning makes any sense at all?

I mean, there's the obvious fact that the circumstances 25 years ago were probably quite different, and similar solutions may very well have seemed and even been quite different in their trade-offs.

Aside from that, there's the obvious fact that 25 years ago, today's middle-aged tea partiers would have been too young to vote, and probably were completely unaware of Reagan's policies.

You're making a blatantly bad-faith argument, implying as fact things which are, generally, unlikely to be true. Why?

You know how old I was in 1982? Nine. Why on earth would I care about Reagan's policies in that year? Why would those policies have any relevance at all to my opinion of the policies being proposed today? You know what? If I think it's a bad policy now, then--all things being equal--I think it was a bad policy then.

Ronald Reagan? I didn't vote for him. I didn't pay much attention to him. I wasn't even living in this country for half his presidency. I always assumed he was a pretty cool dude, but if you're prepared to present evidence that he's at least as bad as Obama, and in exactly the same, statist way, I'm more than happy to change my opinion.
 
theprestige said:
So if it's not full-blown socialism, it can't possibly have socialist characteristics?

And it's impossible to trend towards full-blown socialism? You have to implement it all at once, overnight?
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Let me know when the government even starts owning the means of production. Then we can talk about the slippery slope.
 
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