fall in line, or pay a fine.

“We already ration. We’re just going to ration, rationally.” So goes the retort of Socialists and Socialist-appeasers when confronted with overwhelming and un-debatable evidence that our new federal health plan will engage in rationing regularly.

What else is un-debatable is what I just implied, and what I made explicit in my last my post: all people who support, vote for, advocate or engage in centralized economic planning and the take-over of vast portions of the private economy are without a doubt Socialists. Henceforth, we can and should proceed stridently in all debates, charging swiftly toward the issues and arguments at hand. The consummate misrepresentation by modern American Liberals—Ms. Progressive, if you’re nasty—of their own platform won them two straight elections. Call them Progressive, and it seems like they support progress; but accurately call them Socialists, and it rings of totalitarianism.  It should, and it’s not just tea bagger talk.

Never again should we tolerate any nonsensical jibber-jabber about this one and that one not being Socialist, or about Socialism being an unfair or inflammatory label. What was good enough for Marx should be good enough for Obama.

So, what is Socialism? I have always said modern American Liberals (a term I must shortly retire) are experts on Socialism in that they are always prepared to tell us what it is not. “Taking over the auto companies is Socialism;” “No its not!” “Bailing out banks and buying shares in them with tax dollars, then directing the CEOs as to how much they may take in per year is Socialism;” “No its not!” “Taking over the health care industry and mandating individuals to buy insurance under threat of fine or imprisonment is Socialism;” “No its not, Tea-Bagger!”

Admittedly, there is no one definable point at which we can point at a society and declare “Socialism,” but neither is a specified point at which we can declare “Democracy,” “Freedom,” “Republicanism,” or “Aristocracy.” The organizing political principles upon which societies govern almost always run along spectrums. Rarely do they manifest themselves in simple binary states. Was pre-Revolution France a monarchy or an aristocracy? Could it not have been both, just as the European Union mixes democratic and Socialist principles?

Still, I’ve been told Socialist, Marxist, Communist, and Fascist all have refined, historically defined places in our lexicon. We can’t call people Fascist and Communist!

Yes, we can.

Nazi Socialism may not have looked just like Soviet Socialism any more than Cuban, Venezuelan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Canadian, European Union or American Socialism all look exactly alike. What we have with Socialism is a broader family with a single, unifying set of economic principles.

Socialism, in sum, demands that all decisions affecting all of society’s interests be funneled into the hands of small groups of central planners. Those central planners set prices and wages, ration goods and services and control the market. In effect, the central planners take the place of the free market’s price system. The price of eggs is not set by a government bureaucrat, it rises and falls based on how many eggs there are in the market, how many egg-sellers there are, how many people are willing to buy eggs, and how the egg-sellers respond to consumer demand. If ten people sell eggs for $3 a carton, and two are selling the same carton for $2, the latter are likely to attract all the consumers. The other ten respond or go out of business selling eggs.

Central planners have a different agenda: equality. The central planners take it upon themselves to engineer the best society for all by price fixing, rationing, taxing, seizing private property and redistributing. If the market forces the price of eggs so low that some egg-sellers are endangered, the central planners might decide to set a minimum price to keep them in business.

In the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for the purpose of raising the market price on agricultural commodities by creating artificial scarcity. Farmers were paid to not use their farmland, and fined if they did use their land (their land). Millions of acres of cotton were destroyed or left to rot, and over 6 million pigs were killed. One day, someone will have to explain to me why, during an economic depression where people were starving and in search of work, the wisest idea government could come up with was to destroy crops and livestock and pay farmers to not produce! Fortunately, the incomes of farmers increased slightly, as the nation’s unemployment ballooned and hunger became commonplace. Problem solved, I suppose.

So, under Barak Obama, the central government has re-ignited its decade’s old war on federalism (the principle that the federal government is a government of limited purpose, supreme to the states, but distinct in scope. While the states retain all powers not Constitutionally-delegated to the federal government. These powers include the regulation of police, education and public health). The central government has subsidized, bought equity in, increased its regulation of, and, or taken over student loans, auto companies, mortgages, and now health care: these sectors alone account for nearly 48% of the private market.

They have bought shares in private banks and now direct salaries with a “Pay Czar.” (Much to my chagrin that last part is not an amusing joke). The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to gain a regulatory power on par with the Internal Revenue Services once cap and trade is passed. Speaking of which, the new health care plan established 16,500 new IRS agents as enforcers of the new health bill.

Federal spending has soared over the last year. It is set to reach 100% of gross domestic product within Obama’s first term. That’s more than $13 trillion spent by the federal government: a number equal to all that is spent by 300 million Americans on all of their good and services in a given year.

Taxes will increase, and the top bracket will be giving more than 40% to the federal government (once state, local, sales and property taxes are accounted, those citizens will be paying well over 50% of their incomes to some form of government).

What shall we call Barak Obama, then, a free market man? A Jeffersonian?

Welfare programs remain insolvent, and the health care plan aims to make them worse. Yes, aims.

The trustees of Social Security say the program has $ 17 trillion in unfunded liabilities. (The Congressional Budget Office projected that Social Security would, for the first time, have yearly budget deficits by 2016. This week we were told that will occur this year instead. By contributing pennies to an Individual Retirement Account, one can expect a large account waiting for them in retirement. Yet when government seizes their money in every paycheck from high school to the nursing home, one can now expect no more than an IOU).

The trustees of Medicare claim that unfunded liabilities are now approaching $90 trillion. That means that promised benefits for current and future beneficiaries are expected to exceed what tax revenues will be able to take in by $90 trillion. If we do nothing, Medicare will be $90 trillion in debt in today’s dollars, come the 2070s and 80s. Obama’s solution: let’s make a health care system that’s even bigger and more expensive!

(Illogic: getting leftwing liberals elected since 1933).

By making these systems even worse, opportunity shall soon knock for big government. The individual mandate should not fool anyone. Taking a fine for not carrying insurance shall ultimately be cheaper than carrying insurance and paying a premium. In Massachusetts, the individual mandate which that state enacted several years ago has caused premium prices to soar, leaving more state citizens uninsured today than there were before the plan was set up. No one should be fooled. Once this happens on a national scale, Socialists like Dennis Kucinich (tireless advocate of single-payer, socialized medicine) shall be pleased for having switched his vote. Once the system becomes so expensive and out of control, the central government can step in with another fix: a public option. The public option will be cheaper than private premiums, and attract the entire market. At this point, we shall have a single payer health care system.

Still Obama, assures us that the individual mandate will be economically efficient. Instead of paying for people who get sick without insurance, we shall force all citizens to buy insurance. This will save the whole of society money in the aggregate. To this end, we shall also tax sins: tanning beds, condoms, fatty foods, cigarettes. The day is not far off where we will seriously discuss banning cigarettes and fast food all together: lifestyle choices tax the system; all our interests have been placed into the system; the central planners must develop the system that saves money for the whole; the central planners must work for the interests of the whole; if one person gets cancer from smoking, he burdens the system. Take away those smokes!

Indeed, while we are at it, why not daily morning exercise? It will save the nation billions, I’m sure, if everyone in the new health care plan gets fit, right? Why should anyone think this state of affairs is far off, less than a week after being commanded to buy health insurance by the central government?

This is how Socialism operates. In a free market, we buy our own services from companies competing for our business by selling low. The individual–the free agent of the market–is king. In Socialist systems, our interests are put into a blender with everyone else’s, and the products and services are equally distributed in a one-size fits all manner. Want a cigarette? Too bad, it causes cancer. Don’t want to buy health insurance? Too bad, it costs everyone else money. Eat your vegetables and brush your teeth. Want to buy a health insurance plan that doesn’t cover prenatal care? Too bad!

The reason the slave in the cotton field was a slave is because he did not own his body or its output. The product of his labor, the cotton, belonged to someone else. We become morally outraged when we recall that during Reconstruction, sharecropping depended on a system where Black farmers were effectively rendered serfs, giving the majority of their output to rich landowners. The line between the former type of servitude and the latter is, in effect, paper-thin.

What do we call it when more than 50% of a person’s earning is claimed by the government? What do we call it when more than 50% of all industry is claimed by the government? What do we call it when people are told fall in line or pay a fine?

If this is not Socialism, what is this?