A Pew Research poll conducted in 2007 showed a growing number (54 percent) of Americans agreed with the statement: “Government should help the needy even if it means growing debt.”  According to the same poll, that trend corresponded to a widening gap of Americans who identified themselves with Democrats vice Republicans.  One year later, we elected Barack Obama. 

But that was before unemployment hit 10 percent and the economy failed to turn around.  As the bad news mounted, Americans returned to their senses and Obama’s opposition grew bolder, even declaring what many suspected all along—that Barack Obama was a socialist.

I don’t believe Barack Obama is a socialist. A socialist is one who fully supports public ownership of the means of production.  Obama is more likely an interventionist—a person who reluctantly admits the advantages of private ownership but believes government should intervene to rectify its evils. 

The problem, according to the late economist Ludwig Von Mises, is there really is no middle way between capitalism and socialism.  When an interventionist tries to control the market through “authoritarian decrees and prohibitions,” a spiral of unintended consequences ensues, forcing the government to either give up on its ambitions or pursue more intervention. 

As Mises points out, as difficulties mount interventionists are faced “with the alternative either of abstaining from all acts of intervention, and thereby leaving private property on its own, or of replacing private property by socialism.” [i]

Nowhere is this principle more evident than in the health care legislation.  Since Scott Brown ensured the death of government run health care, Democrats have had trouble envisioning comprehensive reform without government control. As the Wall Street Journal points out:

… the Administration and some Democrats seem to be pulling for a scaled-back plan that could command bipartisan support—the "core elements," as President Obama put it in a what-went-wrong interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Here the problem is that they're basically all core elements. Most everything in ObamaCare as it stands is designed to "solve" a problem created by something else in the bill.

The regulations that would convert insurance companies into public utilities could easily create market death spirals in the majority of states that have been sensible enough to avoid those rules. Thus the requirement for a coercive and unpopular mandate that people buy coverage, which in turn is more expensive because of these regulations, which in turn requires hefty insurance subsidies, which in turn requires big tax increases.

"It turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected," Mr. Obama conceded…

As Obama is coming to see, interventionism isn’t as easy as advertised. The more he tries to bend the market to suit his idea of “social justice,” the more power he must grab and more mandates he must support. It’s no wonder many Americans believe he’s a socialist.

[i] Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, (Indianapolis:  Liberty Fund, 2005), 144.