I keep hearing people say Obama is a socialist. Well, not saying it, but writing it in postings at BeliefNet and on the right-wing blogs I click on by accident or read about in the real world. And I've heard that the talking androids on the TV are saying it, although I don't know how much cuz I don't got no TV myself.

I always say to myself when I hear that, "Yeah. I wish."

Folks who see the world in nice, neat categories, stowed away in little boxes, may find this hard to believe, but Karl Marx and Adam Smith are not irreconcilable.

Free enterprise can exist and thrive alongside Social Security and Medicare. In fact, free enterprise and socialism can co-exist and both be better because of the association.

And make no mistake, as Barack might say, Social Security and Medicare are socialist programs. It's silly to pretend they're not.

Just because we have Social Security doesn't mean we're going to end up a communist dictatorship. That's a right-wing fallacy known in logic as the slippery slope argument.

Whatever best serves the people is the constitutional ideal. The government exists to serve all of us, not just the privileged few. If it doesn't serve us, it needs to be abolished.

"Oppostion is true friendship" said William Blake. And the world is neither black nor white.

Seein the world in ideological terms abstracts it. The real world is not an abstraction or a computer model.

We need small-scale free enterprise, and a return to family-owned businesses and small farms, where people compete to do a better job and, if successful, make a lot of money. Such people used to inhabit all the small towns of this country, where they owned a home and a business building, were integral parts of their communities, served on the library boards and chambers of commerce and school boards and PTA's, and were citizens in the truest sense. They tended to be conservative. And I mean that in a good way.

That was before the corporatocracy moved in on small communities with their Wal-Mart and their Burger Kings and their Midas Mufflers. And now most of those towns are ruins, with shabby looking but frequently busy strip malls on their peripheries. This is not what people need.

And we need Social Security and Medicare for all.

Power to the people. Viva Carlos Marx.