Frum on Obama's "Socialism"

Conservative blogger David Frum takes his peers to task for fact-challenged, over-heated rhetoric about the President on Frum Forum.

Conservatives who fume against the president’s supposed socialism are chasing phantoms: railing against dead ideas while failing to notice the actual gathering dangers to economic liberty and American prosperity. It’s not the red hand of socialism we have to fear. It’s the dead hand of the status quo. An example:

In 2009, the US health economy reached a symbolic tipping point: for the first time, more than 50% of the dollars spent on health were spent by some agency of federal or state government. Sounds like socialism, right? But this tipping point was not driven by President Obama. It was driven by the growth of Medicare – and last I heard, it was President Obama who was proposing slowdowns in Medicare spending, and it was Sarah Palin and the Tea Party activists who were denouncing reductions in Medicare as tantamount to “death panels.”

One of Frum's writers, writing under the witty pseudonym of Eugene Debs, chimes in.

Most importantly, the word “socialism”, as Kurtz uses it in a contemporary, as opposed to historical, context, is meaningless; the sheerest anachronism. We’re not sitting around shooting the bull in a Paris or Berlin café, circa 1906 or 1920. Nobody thinks Walmart and Target should be nationalized or even “publicly owned” by ACORN. Nobody argues for anything but variations on the mixed economy — those variations are critical inflections of public policy, but, once you realize that the free trading, private ownership supporting Danes, are just as supportive of a mixed economy, rather than a command and control economy, as John Cornyn (claims), then you also realize that socialism’s day is done. Calling somebody a socialist today is like calling them a Platonist or a Copernican — the word no longer has any analytical purchase outside of Havana.

--Ballard Burgher