During a question and answer session after addressing a Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall in Buenos Aires, Argentina, President Obama finally embraced his socialist/communist tendencies telling his audience they shouldn’t worry about the differences between Capitalism and Communism/Socialism:

So often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist.  And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right?  Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property. And I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just decide what works.

You can read a complete transcript of the video below:

There is just so much wrong with Obama trying to draw some moral equivalence between capitalism which enabled the United States to become the greatest country the world has ever seen and Communism/socialism which has been responsible for so much tyranny and oppression.

One of the most problematic differences between the Capitalism and Communism/Socialism, and the one which Obama’s words most fully embrace is, of course, the Communist mantra that the ends justify the means. That’s what it means to say just choose what works. Since the fall of the failed Soviet Union — that despotic Evil Empire that was brought to its knees by President Ronald Reagan after this Country waged a long cold war against it, Communism now serves as a dire warning for how even well-intentioned ideas can be extremely dangerous and how, if you justify the means by the end, the envisioned end might never be achieved.

Just think how far Obama has evolved from the early days of his presidency when he feared and objected to being called a Socialist. He now doesn’t even think twice about suggesting that young leaders embrace Communism/Socialism

Video transcript (if you want more context the complete transcript of Obama’s remarks at the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall at Usina Del Arte Buenos Aires, Argentina on March 23, 2016 is available here:

But more and more, I believe that that’s going to be the wave of the future if we want to make progress on these problems.

I guess to make a broader point, so often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist.  And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right?  Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property.  And I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works.  You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just decide what works.

And I said this to President Castro in Cuba.  I said, look, you’ve made great progress in educating young people.  Every child in Cuba gets a basic education — that’s a huge improvement from where it was.  Medical care — the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care.  That’s a huge achievement.  They should be congratulated.  But you drive around Havana and you say this economy is not working.  It looks like it did in the 1950s.  And so you have to be practical in asking yourself how can you achieve the goals of equality and inclusion, but also recognize that the market system produces a lot of wealth and goods and services.  And it also gives individuals freedom because they have initiative.

And so you don’t have to be rigid in saying it’s either this or that, you can say — depending on the problem you’re trying to solve, depending on the social issues that you’re trying to address what works.  And I think that what you’ll find is that the most successful societies, the most successful economies are ones that are rooted in a market-based system, but also recognize that a market does not work by itself.  It has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis, and there has to be inclusion.  Otherwise it’s not stable.

And it’s up to you — whether you’re in business or in academia or the nonprofit sector, whatever you’re doing — to create new forms that are adapted to the new conditions that we live in today.