The Friday Podcast: We Found A Socialist!

toggle caption Whitney Curtis/AP

The Friday Podcast: We Found A Socialist! Listen

Despite what you may have heard, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats aren't socialists. And the top Republicans in Washington aren't free-market libertarians.

But given how freely everybody's throwing those terms around these days, we're wading in to get a deeper understanding of what they really mean.

On today's Planet Money, we talk to an actual socialist — Richard Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts — about socialism. Coming next week: Libertarianism.

For more on our conversation with Wolff, read our post from yesterday. For further reading, see Wolff's web site.

Special socialism bonus:

We asked Wolff whether the health-care overhaul passed by the Democrats is a socialist plan. Here's his answer:

What was passed has nothing remotely to do with a socialist plan. You might call it a socialist plan ... if doctors were public employees hired as a kind of public service, a little bit like groundskeepers in a park or policemen. ... We don't have that. ... The second way you might imagine an old-style socialist health program is if the government took over the basic job of insuring our health. So it might leave the doctors private but it would be a government insurance program paid for out of public funds to provide everyone with a guarantee of access to health care. And nothing like that was proposed or passed by the Obama administration.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Billy Bragg's "The Red Flag." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.