This entire line of thinking comes down to the fallacy of the excluded middle. Anything that suggests government intervention is immediately socialism, in this line of thought, ignoring, therefore, the entire post-Keynesian history of the West. Unless, of course, you think that entire history is a history of socialism. In which case, good luck trying to explain how traders exist in a socialist society.
And the trajectory seems to be accelerated mainly by the logic of the interventionist cycle: bad policy leads to bad results that are addressed through bad policy, and so on, straight down the fast track to serfdom. Obama's attachment to "transparency" â the buzzword of the day â allows all intelligent people to observe the sickening sight in real time, and to the cheers of the kept class of intellectual phonies like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman.