Socialism is an excuse used by the politically ambitious to amass personal power.  Barack Obama's socialism is no different.

There is a story I encountered years ago, perhaps apocryphal, about the Greek Philosopher Plato.  According to the story he convinced the people of the colony of Syracuse to install the system he advocated in his best-known work "The Republic" with himself as the philosopher king.  According to the story Plato failed miserably, as a philosopher king and was fortunate to be banished.  To the best of my knowledge no one has tried to install this system since. 

However, this didn't stop other people from writing about politics and proposing systems for the governance and humanity.  Not all have been put to the test of practicality, and some may be impossible to implement.  One can be fairly certain, however, that generally speaking, the authors of these ideas truly believed in them.  This is also probably true of Karl Marx. 

While an objective examination of Marx's works shows that his analysis of history was flawed and written from his personal subjective viewpoint, it is unlikely that someone would spend the time and effort, as he did, on something he did not believe in.  Likewise, his beliefs about human nature were flawed, but he stuck with them in spite of the evidence all around him that he was wrong.  And, because he did not personally profit from his work to any significant degree, one has to argue that he was not motivated by anything other than his personal beliefs.  This is probably not true of those who followed in his wake. 

Consider Mao and Lenin, both of whom set themselves up as heads of government.  Neither saw anything wrong with committing genocide to achieve their goals.  What may be most telling was the term attributed to Lenin; "useful idiots."  It may well be that Lenin saw these people as true believers in the Marxist myth who could be used to help him achieve the personal power, which was his goal all along.  Marxism was then, quite likely a mere excuse that provided him with the means to acquire followers and a reason for fomenting revolution.  It was a revolution in the name of the Marxist idea, but Marxism was window dressing for his personal ambition. 

The same can be said for the politically ambitious who promise to bring "social justice" and end up benefiting themselves and their cronies, while the population they made promises to remains in the same position as before.  Perhaps the best modern example is in Korea where a dictatorial leader rules the north and the population practically starves.  Yet, in the south, an essentially democratic system governs one of the most prosperous economies in Asia, if not the world.  It is, of course, far from perfect, but it is better than the North Korean alternative. 

Which brings us to something I encountered back during my teens in a book or the Soviet Union.  The author said that the most essential difference between the USSR and the USA was that in the USA you could buy anything if you had enough money.  In the USSR, it didn't matter how much money you had, if you didn't have enough political influence to get into the stores that had what you wanted.  So, the question was presented:  Would you rather live in a society where money was the most important commodity, or where political influence was? 

Barack Obama's current political fortunes have been built on the backs of useful idiots.  That is, people who would vote for him on the basis of his ability to read a teleprompter in front of an audience, regardless of who he truly was and what he truly wanted.  We see from recent experience that he what he truly stands for is himself and his cronies, as long as they are useful to him.  He dumped Jeremiah Wright when he became a liability.  He repudiated his instructions to his new NASA administrator when they became an embarrassment.  Then, he has continually avoided taking responsibility for anything until it has turned out favorably.  He blamed everyone else for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill until BP was finally able to cap the blown out well.  Then he began to refer to "we" and "us" as the parties responsible for having done so.  He uses the American people to achieve his goal of personal power and privilege.  And, those who believe that he can bring about a better society or follow him because of his ethnic background are even more the idiots because they will not profit from whatever power he achieves. 

Obama is another charismatic political leader typical of those found in the 20^th century.  They always made large promises but failed to deliver.  Inevitably, charismatic leaders whose primary interest is personal power always fail to deliver because they aren't at all interested in what would benefit the people or the nation.  The good of the people and authoritarian political power will be almost always mutually exclusive.  They cannot exist together for long, and when they do, what is good for the people invariably dies.  The exception; the benevolent despot appears to be a virtual non-entity. 

The important lesson here is that any politician who promises the moon on a silver platter is probably a con man looking for personal power.  Personal power is something that they can deliver with enough followers.  The paradise that they promise such followers is never possible in the real world.

In the last of the Tintin books by cartoonist, Herge'.  Tintin helps his old friend General Alcazar kick his rival, General Tapioca out of control of the South American nation of San Theodoros.  In the first cartoon panel of the book there is a pair of military policemen walking by a tin shack slum.  Over the course of the book the implication is that Alcazar will change things for the better, but in the last panel there is another pair of policemen walking past the same slum wearing different uniforms.  Herge' might have made it all the more illustrative by having the same men in those different uniforms, but he neglected to take it that far. 

What Barack Obama wants to do is install himself as one of those banana republic dictators.  The only reason why we haven't seen thuggish police walking past massive slums is that he hasn't been able to amass enough power to achieve that as yet.  And if the American people now understand the danger, he never will.