Thursday, June 14, 2012

Semantics

Limiting himself to the classical definition of socialism as state ownership of the means of production, Thomas Sowell describes Obama's liberal agenda of state regulation of the means of production, etc. as left-fascist* rather than socialist. National Socialism was socialist in the same sense**: leaving German corporations in private hands but so powerfully regulating them by law as to make the State the controlling partner in fact.

Our combined obsessions about discrimination and health-and-safety give the State massive reasons to engage in what amounts to confiscatory regulation: you may own it, but they decide how you can or must use it. In such a world, a principled religious refusal to pay for or offer certain medical procedures in your Federally-mandated (!) insurance program constitutes a "war on women" and an inquisitorial imposition of "private" theological scruples on society.


*Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism argued that liberalism and fascism are family.

**Stephen Hicks makes this clear in his work on Nietzsche and the Nazis, that the Party was a fusion of nationalism and anti-capitalist socialism, regulatory rather than rankly confiscatory socialism.

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