[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Vampyr

Since Obama has taken office I have also seen a lot of people throwing around the words "socialist" and "fascist" without really stopping to consider what they really mean, or if Obama is really behaving that way. They just hear people on the news using those words and regurgitate them.

Fascism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

Specifically

Fascists explicitly promoted their ideology as a "Third Position" between capitalism and communism.[124] Italian Fascism involved corporatism, a political system in which economy is collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at national level.[125] Fascists advocated a new national multi-class economic system that is labeled as either national corporatism, national socialism or national syndicalism.[24] The common aim of all fascist movements was elimination of the autonomy or, in some cases, the existence of large-scale capitalism.[126]

Socialism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Specifically

Economically, socialism denotes an economic system of state ownership and/or worker ownership of the means of production and distribution. In the economy of the Soviet Union, state ownership of the means of production was combined with central planning, in relation to which goods and services to make and provide, how they were to be produced, the quantities, and the sale prices. Soviet economic planning was an alternative to allowing the market (supply and demand) to determine prices and production. During the Great Depression, many socialists considered Soviet-style planned economies the remedy to capitalism's inherent flaws – monopoly, business cycles, unemployment, unequally distributed wealth, and the economic exploitation of workers.

I think we can agree that President Obama isn't what you would call a capitalist. So, looking at these two models, which of these seems more appropriate?

Hmmmm... maybe Obama isn't a socialist after all...