Maybe I'll get a warning for this, but you mentioned markets delivering what people want, and the only time I used markets was in the term "market failure" which is an economic term.
It describes scenarios where markets fail to deliver best (optimal) outcomes. For example, "the tragedy of the commons," where everyone has access to something (say grazing lands or fish in the ocean) and while everyone collectively has an incentive not to over-graze or over fish (in some future no one gets to graze or gets fish if the resource is over-used), no individual has an incentive not to fish or graze (if I alone don't fish or graze, I lose out now, and my non-use alone isn't enough, so I don't fish or graze in the future either -- or even if me alone not participating IS enough, I still never get to fish or graze now or in the future). There can be other failures, like monopolies, or in health care, "it's impossible for me to shop for the best combination of cost and service because I'm currently having a heart attack and will take whatever medicine is closest available."
Socialized medicine is socialized, sure, but it's a center-of-the-economic-road socializing to any industrialized nation other than the states, because it actually REDUCES collective costs. Even right-wingers tend to like saving money.
Finally, if that is what he supports (I could not find a credible source on the subject), even it alone doesn't make him left. He's pro-business and pro-tax breaks for the well-off. He has made no attempt to alter the tax code on big business or capital gains. Did you know that despite making 18B in profits last year, AT&T paid -6.4% in taxes last year (negative! The were given more money by the gov't than they paid)? Obama has no plans to change that, and never did.
I don't doubt it; crony capitalism or corporatism has always been a feature of more collectivized governments until you go all the way to communism. The Italian Fascists were big on it. The Nazis were big fans of it; Hitler once noted "People keep asking me if I'm going to nationalize industries. Why would I, when I've nationalized the industrialists?"
You don't have to go to totalitarian levels to see it either; corporatism was standard practice during the New Deal. FDR literally said he wanted to give corporations a "seat at the table", so to speak. Instead of letting corporations compete openly in the market, as well as workers competing in the labor market, what FDR wanted was for these things to be hashed out behind closed doors, with an agreed-upon resolution. Instead of the market, he was literally (although I doubt he used the term) enabling cartels, both of labor and of production. Much of this was ruled unconstitutional, since it involved telling smaller businesses that they weren't allowed to produce more than so much of whatever they produced, and that they were legally barred from competing by selling cheaper than their competitors.
One of my favorite modern political writers is a guy named Jonah Goldberg, and he's noted before that he isn't so much pro-business or pro-corporation as he is pro-market; I have to say I'm the same way. Nor do I consider the Democrats or even some nakedly socialist parties in other countries to be exactly "anti-business". Businesses, especially larger corporations, often do quite well in socialist countries, assuming their assets aren't simply nationalized. If I had to guess, most people actually running a socialist country these days would probably say outright expropriation is bush-league socialism, amateur stuff fit only for banana republic types like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. Modern socialists -
successful socialists, that is, simply want a hand in how the corporations are operated.
They also seem to favor larger corporations over smaller businesses, I assume because it's easier to work with a smaller number of large entities rather than gazillions of smaller ones.
As for your first point - yes, there are such things as market failures. The tragedy of the commons is one, but then that's a fairly easily resolved situation. If it's an asset that simply has to be collectively owned, you can simply set limits on use of the resources in question. If it's something that can be privately owned, sell off whatever the government owns of it. If a business owns it then it tends to be in their interest to manage it well. Logging companies who actually own the land they log are of course going to replant after logging an area, because if they don't their land ends up being worthless to them.
Your reference to health care doesn't fit, though. Most health care is not delivered in an emergency situation. There is no market for emergency ambulance service, because as you say it's not possible to make sensible choices in an emergency situation like a heart attack. But health insurance is supposed to be something you choose beforehand, based on whatever priorities you yourself set: cost, coverage, etc. Same for a choice of doctor; outside of unforeseeable emergencies, you need to have your doctor picked out ahead of time.
As far as Obama not pushing for tax increases - he's done what he can as far as that goes. To be honest, he's concentrated more on structural alterations instead of fiddling around with taxes. If we define "insurance" as inherently being risk-priced, Obamacare has effectively eliminated actual health insurance, and replaced it with a third-party form of socialized medicine, where price is based on your income, not the risk you bring. It completely redefines how health care and health insurance works. He's basically given Congress he has no intention of enforcing immigration law, etc. and so forth. So no, he isn't tooling around with tax rates for the most part, or attempting to do much with firearms ownership, which is a really risky topic for Democrats outside of a few largely urban areas. He's involved more in structural changes that are intentionally chosen to be difficult to change back.
MODERATORS: I'm new here, and have no idea what the limits are around here, so if political discussion is a flat out no-go, let me know.
