Racism or Political Statement

Is this poster depicting President Obama as an African witch doctor racist or a political protest? The NJ Star-Ledger and many others think it is racist.

However, if you look closely, the message can be taken in a way that has nothing to do with race. I left the following comments:

zemack

If Hillary Clinton was president, and her face was on Skuby’s display with the caption "HillaryCare”—or if, 45 years ago, we saw Lyndon Johnson's face in a storefront with the caption "Medicare”—would either have been deemed racist?

I read the Spring Lake display not as racist, but as a rather effective political statement against collectivized, state-run medicine. Notice the hammer-and-sickle, the symbol of the white-run Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in place of the "C". Collectivism is the neo-tribal doctrine that holds that the individual's only moral purpose is sacrifice and service to "society," as represented by the state, and that the state can therefor override any individual's rights to liberty and property for what it deems to be the "public" or "common good." Collectivism is the doctrine that gives rise to all forms of neo-tribalism, including communism, Nazism, fascism, welfare statism, and all manifestations of socialized medicine. Collectivism knows no racial boundaries, and the tribal witch doctor is an appropriate symbol for anyone who would place control of everyone's healthcare in the hands of a central planner.

Disagree or not, calling Bill Skuby a racist is an unjust smear. If Skuby got anything wrong, it is that he underestimated the extent to which his American-as-apple-pie protest sign would be misunderstood or misrepresented.

One correspondent disagreed that ObamaCare represents central planning.  amazed@humanity wrote:

BUT your central planner statement is incorrect in having national healthcare because we all will have the ability to make decisions on whether to have insurance or not(and a fool if choosing not to protect yourself and loved ones) and what kind of insurance you will have provided towards you.

It's true that America's hybrid public-private healthcare system is not central planning in the Soviet, communist sense of state ownership of the means of healthcare production and deliverance. But central planning comes in many guises, including the fascist variety. Government spending through programs like Medicare and Medicaid already accounts for half of healthcare spending in the US, and that very fact puts government bureaucrats in the position, through the power of the purse, to dictate medical deliverance.

ObamaCare greatly expands the governments already large regulatory control over private insurance companies, effectively making insurers proxies for those same bureaucratic dictates. While rationing (central planning) will not be as overt as in the Soviet model, it will still be there via the government's financial and regulatory efforts to control the accelerating price spiral caused by the decades-long accumulated government interventions. National healthcare gives broad powers to the government, and those powers won't remain dormant. The government is already flexing its central planning muscle: Look no further than the birth control mandate. Those exercise of those powers will be relentlessly expanded. National healthcare in any guise is central planning, regardless of how many "choices" it allows individuals to make. Freedom to choose only among government approved choices is not freedom. It is central planning. That is a fact.