Obama is a socialist? REALLY?!

Short Version: Really? Really? Obama is a socialist? Haha, what a laugh?! What an absolute fucking joke...only a senile, brain dead moron would believe such a crackpot statement.
Long Version: Dear readers, I apologize for my lack of published work lately...I have been quite busy moving out of Ninnyville, and running around galivanting here and there. In any case, this past weekend I spent time with some friends who insisted that Obama is pushing socialism, and that socialism won't work. Another idiot whom I'm related to recently sent me an email claiming some similar bullshit. Here's the email, and afterward I'll explain why I would accuse even friends and family of being idiots:
(Moronic email)"An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that."
First of all, let me say that a teacher's primary goal in issuing a test is to measure learning, which obviously if you are averaging test scores, is not going to happen. If this actually really even happened (the emailer in question is famous for sending along forwards that make false claims and fail to accurately cite sources), I hope that the students recieved a refund for the portion of their tuition that went to enrolling in this guy's class, as he apparently shirked his responsibility to educate his students, or appropriately measure their learning, in order to teach a politically motivated lesson that contains fundamentally flawed logic and that certainly does not belong on the campus of any university or community college.
More broadly, there seems to be this notion among conservatives that Obama is somehow a socialist, when the only significant piece of legislation that has passed under his watch was an economic stimulus package, which A) did not mandate that everyone in the U.S. be paid the same across the board, B) has effectively stopped the economic downward spiral caused by irresponsible laissez faire capitalist housing, banking, and finance policies, and C) is designed to be divyed out by a variety of methods, one of the most prevalent being contract bidding for public works projects, which uses market competition to seek the lowest price for the project.
The only legitimate attack on Obama for being socialist is to cite his support of a public health care option. Admittedly, this would be somewhat socialist, that is to say, the government would be entering a formerly private industry. In truth, what Congress is proposing is simply to provide a public option, allowing regular citizens to buy health insurance through the government. People would still, by the way, be able to buy private insurance--the idea is to drive down costs by providing effective competition, which actually sounds a lot more like capitalism to me--in fact, the only way the market would cease to exist is if the private companies weren't able to compete with the public option.
Ultimately, what we need to remember is this: no one would ever talk about socializing an industry that is effective at delivering a quality product to consumers and that provided healthy profits to its investors. Its precisely when capitalism fails, as we have seen recently with the banking, auto, housing, and health care industries, that the government steps in to regulate or socialize private industry. It has nothing to do with an underlying pinko conspiracy or a belief that government should be in charge of delivering goods and services to consumers. In truth, pure laissez faire capitalism fails for the same reasons that pure socialism like the idiot professor above was exemplifying, and that is because human beings are by their nature selfish and greedy, to the point that they will do things they know are wrong in order to benefit themselves exclusively to the detriment of those around them, the factor of which is largely determined by their access to money and power.
Therefore, good government policy ought to be directed by pragmatism, skepticism, science, and reason. The reason I accuse my relative who sent the email, and friends, of being idiots, is that they ignore their rationale faculties when informing their political position and then try to appeal to other people on an academic basis, the same basis they abandoned when they donned their political philosophy in the first place.
So, I mean, fuck it, go ahead and try to convince me that Obama is a socialist and that everything the Republican party does is sacrosanct, but you better come with something better than this--you better come with something better than Fox News talking points and Limbaugh rants that sound good but fall apart under even the most elementary cross examination. You better come with it, because if you don't, you're only going to contribute the the growing notion that conservatives are a bunch of batshit crazy assholes that believe ridiculous versions of Christianity, hate people that look different or believe different things than they do, and think that Sarah Palin is actually a good person.