Redalgo
Sr. Member
Posts: 2,681
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« on: August 04, 2012, 01:24:00 PM » |
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« edited: August 04, 2012, 01:29:04 PM by Redalgo »
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In terms of economic ideology, I consider President Obama a neo-mercantilist with some strong capitalist and relatively modest, social democratic influences. The recent interventions in the economy were nationalist and populist, not socialist, in nature - the state becoming involved in the markets to promote the national interest and nudge outcomes of market forces toward desirable ends - in this case in an appeal to "the masses" as opposed to "the elites." Barack, being a social liberalist and therefore not especially authoritarian at heart, is much more moderate in how far he runs with this stuff compared to the leaders of other, more clearly neo-mercantilist nations such as the PRC, Japan, Russia, and South Korea.
As for me, I basically take social liberal values to socialist conclusions, but reject the idea of nationalization of the economy as being tantamount to transferring ownership or even control of the means of production to the workers. The "size" of government has nothing to do with whether an economy is capitalist or socialist. Both models are compatible with many forms of government, ranging from anarchism at one extreme to totalitarianism at the other. It is simply that many people - especially Americans - have for decades been fed propaganda that socialism is an economic system of fear and authoritarian oppression whereas capitalism is one of freedom and democracy, which is a laughably false dichotomy.
The kind of socialism I believe in may be interpreted as democratic or market socialism, a form of welfare capitalism, or as some sort of mixed system. A lot of opinions circulate out there about what is and is not capitalist or socialist, after all, and no amount of deliberation here in this thread is going to build up consensus in bringing all of those opinions into harmony. But what I will say is the most hardcore rightists and leftists on economic matters - purists who refuse to mix models at all - are an extremely small minority indeed. Also, variations of liberalism and socialism are not (and never were) the only major political-economic ideologies competing on the global stage.
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