Tuesday, March 17, 2009

With all the talk about whether Obama is a socialist...

...did anyone ever consider asking an actual socialist?


posted by John Althouse Cohen on Tuesday, March 17, 2009
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4 comments:

LemmusLemmus said...

Happy birthday! (Bit late maybe, but still...)

This is something I, as a non-native speaker and someone who's never been to America, have wondered about. I started out assuming that socialist/socialism roughly means what they had in the Soviet Union. Then I started reading quite a few libertarian blogs where, it seemed, the terms were used in a much broader sense (especially in the comments) - basically anything that's not straight out of Milton Friedman's book. I first interpreted that as libertarian hyperbole but then thought that maybe in the US the term simply did have a different meaning.

So where does that leave me now?

March 18, 2009
John Althouse Cohen said...

Thanks!

This video has a good explanation of the 2 different meanings of socialism. Basically, it can either mean communism or garden-variety European-style government.

Conservatives in America are playing on this double meaning by trying to evoke the communist undertones when really they at most mean the European definition -- and even the latter is implausible.

March 18, 2009
LemmusLemmus said...

Thanks! Couldn't see the video, but I think I get it.

March 18, 2009
John Althouse Cohen said...

Sorry, it's an old link and I guess the embed went dead... But yeah, he basically lays out the distinction from my previous comment, points out that it's disingenuous to lump those 2 types of "socialism" together, then explains why Obama and the bank bailout aren't properly called socialist even under the more benign (European) definition.

March 18, 2009

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