That's why I don't tiptoe through the tulips. I come out and say what I really mean. In an effort to communicate clearly without using manifesto inspired double speak, the correct words are communist or fascist.

"The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." Karl Marx 

So, Senator Obama is definitely not a socialist, but if he was, apparently it wouldn't be so bad.

That's like trying to sell that Bill Ayers isn't a terrorist, but even if he was, terror bombing was more about activism than terrorism during Vietnam.

Guess I'll have to stop using the word 'socialist' and just say that Senator Obama is a 'thief' who wants to take money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn't.

Senator Obama is a thief and not a socialist.  Will that work for you Mr Nunberg?  Just trying to help.

The idea that socialism is dead, so why worry about it, is disingenuous. It most certainly is not dead. When Obama told Charlie Gibson that he would raise the capital gains tax, despite what it did for capital revenues, simply out of “fairness,” he crossed a political Rubicon from which he cannot turn back.

Is there any relationship between an individual’s creation of wealth and the distribution of that wealth? Should an individual retain 100% of what he earns? The capitalist answer is “mostly,” with major caveats.

• The individual’s creation of wealth always comes within an infrastructure that society maintains. At the very least, an individual must pay for the support that helped him achieve his wealth.
• Individuals have experienced downturns in the past. To prepare for those bad times, individuals have cooperated with government in creating safety nets, like unemployment insurance and welfare. To achieve the maximum effect, those contributions are pooled. Pooling resources is a trade-off, and once you agree to it, you surrender any right to a specifiable return.
• There are other caveats, but you get the idea.

In capitalism, an individual contributes to government only when (and because) it’s in his own strategic interest. He therefore contributes as little as possible, and governments work on the premise that they can tax individuals only when necessary. But with socialism, the government doesn’t care about the individual’s self-interest. In socialism, the government only cares about the most equitable distribution of wealth, unrelated to how the wealth was created in the first place.

In capitalism, the government has no right to your money. It only receives it as a result of a collective strategic partnership between you and other individuals. Obama’s capital gains comment reveals the socialism inherent in his thinking. He thinks it’s his money, and all that’s left is for him to distribute it wisely.

There is no way to square his “fairness” attitude without relying on a socialist philosophy. The moment Obama said that during the debate, the game was over.

A rose by any other name ...

 "We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism."

- Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

So the word is antiquated... I think the ideaology is antiquated. Funny how "progressives" continue to regress to the "it takes a village to raise a child" belief system. Take the flower out of your hair, pack up the picnic blanket and basket, take the needle out of your arm and the spoon out of your nose... time to grow up.

http://www.southpark...

bomb-throwing radicals - check

super silly parlor pinks -check

insidious subversives - check

Soviet thugs - check 

Third World guerrillas - check

pretentious French intellectuals -check

Prof. Nunberg truly is a cunning linguist. 

Who gets to decide who gets what and when?--after all administrative costs, of course. This is a profound, fundamental issue that all people have either had to decide or have decided for them: forever. The term "socialism" might be an antiquated word in Nunberg's view, but it's put into practice all around us; the state is the administrator. Throw in a little social justice and a few fairness issues, and you have it. Hillary had a suggestion about ownership last year: "The other day the oil companies recorded the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits. And I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will actually begin to move us in the direction of independence." Of course, Jimmy Carter had the Department of Energy established during his administration to do that very thing, and now, billions later, here we are--energy independent?

Irrespective of all this, the administrative costs of all of this are always excessive. The leadership ( read rulers) always have the best houses, largest bank accounts, best cars, best vacations, best retirements, and the best of eveything else. We, the people, get to pay for it. It never changes.

"He’s the author of the book Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating...Left-Wing Freak Show"

Actually, liberals turned themselves into this. Conservatives merely pointed it out. 

McNotObama '08

Dwayne  P.  Theriot

This is just one more attempt by the Left to conceal something BAD by replacing it with something that seems alright. Like when Obama says no one making under 250,000 or is it 200,000, wait I think its now down to 150,000 dollars is going to get a tax increase. What most people forget is that he also says he will rollback the tax rates to what they were during the Clinton years.  Raising them three percentage points for everyone's tax bracket.

Now, maybe he can get Obama to understand you use "an" before words that start with vowels.