Re: Filene's
Just by degrees. After all, when you think about it, you're a socialist too, right? You like your secure homeland, clean streets, low crime, social security, and safe food & drugs, right?
I think there are two questions at play that are quite significant, and which you ignore:
1) Socialism generally refers to moving from private, exchange-based control of economic transactions and toward public, use-based control of them.
I'm going to assume that when Obama is called a socialist, people are referring to ObamaCare, the stimulus or other major legislative initiatives (including, e.g., "cap and trade").
All of these initiatives do (or would) indeed move spheres of human activity from the private realm to the public sector. Indeed, federal government spending has jumped from the traditional post-WWII level of 20% of GDP to 25% this year, and budget projections going forward expect it to remain there.
You refer to, and implicitly label markers of socialism, certain other government programs, namely the military, sanitation departments, police forces, Social Security and food-safety standards.
It's true that those areas do involve government control of resources, and in a sense they may be "socialist." I think the issue for many people is the degree, and quality, of that public-sector control of resources. Few people, including those in the Tea Party (given that recent polls show the Tea Partiers are not significantly less comfortable with current levels of taxation than are other Americans), would like to see government eliminated; that would be anarchy.
The question, instead, is what areas of human activity government should play a prominent role in. Traditionally, America has had the military (at the federal level) and police forces (at the local level) placed under government's ken. There is good reason for this: Unlike any other entity or human organization, government can resort to physical detention and force to enforce its objectives; as such, it has overseen force-based law-enforcement and security mechanisms.
I think the other areas are palatable to people for various reasons as well: Food-safety standards, like any regulatory system, involve central oversight with the ability to punish (backstopped by force, if need be) violations, including and especially those coming from abroad -- given Congress' function to oversee commerce among the several states, this is a fairly natural place for federal oversight. Sanitation departments, like police forces, are always administered at the local level and don't involve federal powers. And Social Security is a "flat tax," meaning that it pays out to pensioners what they put in.
I think that people, Tea Partiers and the rest of us, may be fine with those things -- and many others. But with total government spending (federal + state + local) at ~40% of GDP, the concern is less for today and more for what is to come.
What distinguishes many of Obama's initiatives, and what many people find dubious about them, is that they would entail a fairly large expansion of power for the federal government, as well as large amounts of funding, either to achieve goals that not all agree with, or to achieve them in a way that not all agree with.
As an illustration of this, there are legitimate concerns that, while expanding insurance coverage is an obvious good, ObamaCare will do it in a way that unnecessarily raises costs for those who are insured and may ultimately put the entire existing system at risk, potentially leading to a government "rescue" of healthcare by moving toward a single-payer system.
Another area in which the Obama agenda differs from the programs you list and has more in common with, e.g., Medicaid, is that much of it (ObamaCare, much of the social spending in the stimulus, an ever-increasing timeframe for unemployment benefits) is redistributive -- it takes disproportionately from high-earners and gives back disproportionately to low-earners. Military, law-enforcement, the FDA and sanitation benefit all equally; and Social Security is a flat tax where all pay the same proportion into it. A redistributive transfer system, however, acts to penalize success for the sake of failure (crudely, but accurately, putting it), thereby disincentivizing the former and making the latter a more-palatable option for people. In its rejection of meritocratic, exchange-based systems, that is much more "socialist" than many of the more-popular areas of government responsibility at present.
Whether the programs Obama is proposing/advocating are needed, or would be beneficial to American citizens, is a fair question, as is whether government should have a greater degree of control, and the private sector less control, over these areas. One can argue without being a fool that economies that have greater degrees of socialization (in Western Europe, e.g.) see economic growth stagnate and unemployment plateau at a level more than twice of what we have historically had in the US (~9% vs. ~4%). I don't think anyone worried about those sorts of things is necessarily a fool, extremist, racist, or hick.
2) Secondly, I think that the general level of spending -- and how it will be paid for -- is a large concern that is short-sighted to dismiss. In Obama's first year, deficits exploded by a trillion dollars to $1.4 trillion, meaning the deficit alone was more than half the total 2007 US budget (see
here for a good chart showing deficits/surpluses in recent years).
While some of this spending is deficit-caused and temporary, the big takeaway is that deficits are never again expected to be less than $650 billion, and after 2020 they're expected to drop again, never closing up to less than $800 billion (versus a high of $480 billion in 2004 for Bush, who, yes, was a shitty-ass president but closed the deficit to $188 billion by 2007).
Given a future of permanent deficits and government spending increasing 25% as a proportion of GDP, common sense tells us that somebody, somehow, is going to be called to pay for these things. Governments generally finance themselves via one of two ways (or both): deficits and taxes.
If you pursue the former route and pile on the debt, at a certain point people have to begin to ask when you're going to pay all of your debts back. As a sovereign borrower, the interest rates demanded of you by your creditors rise accordingly. And those higher interest rates are passed down through the entire economy, making it more difficult for businesses and individuals to receive credit, stultifying economic growth. No good.
As for taxes, if I'm a rational human being, why do I want to pay increased taxes for a plan that throws an estimated $250 billion per annum at subsidizing healthcare costs for 30 million people ($10,000 per person per annum!), is likely to raise costs for everyone, and may well break the entire existing system, leaving me with higher taxes, more expensive health insurance and the possibility that the whole thing breaks apart?
What we're seeing is socialized cost-sharing (and risk-taking) at a level that we previously didn't have. Is that "socialism"? Given its reliance on the state taking a larger share of the economy, disincentivizing productive economic activity, and redistributing wealth, it's not so crazy to call it that, even if you like Social Security (which is also on the brink of insolvency) or the army.
Is it legitimate to argue in favor of those things? Yes. But is it legitimate to protest against them, even if you're wearing a Ben Franklin hat and/or cowboy boots? I sure hope so.
