More Private Sector Jobs Equals Less Socialism?

In his short piece yesterday in The Huffington Post, Mark Gongloff pokes fun at Rand Paul’s claim that President Obama is turning the US into a ‘Socialist Nightmare.’ Gongloff begins:

In what must be history’s strangest socialist dictatorship, hiring by private companies just hit a record high. Meanwhile the government is still not hiring anybody.

Political rhetoric aside over whether Obama’s policies are socialist or not, the hallmark of socialism is not necessarily a growing public sector, but growing regulation (control over the markets) and redistributionism. Gongloff simply erects a strawman misled by Republican rhetoric over jobs and fears of private sector losses.