White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

America’s Year of Thinking Dangerously

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By Llewellyn King

If you accept that seminal means an event or moment after which things will never be the same again, then we are living through a seminal year.

In matters big and small, change is in the wind.

This wind blew through Iowa and New Hampshire, and is defining the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are not so much the leaders of this time of change, but rather the products.

The product is something hard to pin down, but it is there nonetheless — a sense that it is time to turn the page, to read the next chapter; a yearning for something fresh.

The millennials, hunched over their cell phones, are looking for the future in their small screens. The rest of us are looking for it in new leaders, new lifestyles; and new thinking, sometimes about old ideas.

Societies go through periods when they feel the need to change up things. But they want a sped-up evolution rather than a full-fledged revolution. This is such a time.

Change is everywhere from the bold, new things television is doing — frontal nudity, gay coupling and interracial love — to the kind of car we favor.

While we grapple with change and yearn for the new, we are surprisingly open-minded. American values appear to be undergoing a recalibration: We are getting more socially tolerant. Social conservatives are a diminished force.

Young people do not have the same commitment their parents had to conventional employment, to be defined by where they work. This leads to a world where people are less concerned with appearances, and all that goes with appearances. The business suit and its essential accoutrement, the necktie, are on the way out – and in much of the country, they are now curiously out of date. Apartments are being favored over houses because of new social values.

My generation experienced the hopeful 1940s (just the tail end), the smug 1950s, the turbulent 1960s, the oil-shocked 1970s, and the computer-excited 1980s, which continued unabated until the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century – but re-inflated with new developments in Internet products like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In recent times, the only new American billionaire outside of the Internet was Hamdi Ulukaya, who popularized Greek yogurt in country hungry for yogurt choices. That is a dumbfounding fact. It means that it will be harder to get investment in old-line businesses and start-ups. The smart money has become myopically obsessed with the cyberworld.

If you were to go to Wall Street today to raise money for a new nuclear reactor that put all doubts of the past to rest and offered income for 100 years — there are such machines on the drawing board – you would find it hard to raise money; easier for a new Internet messaging system. This when there is no shortage of Internet messages (too many, I cry each morning). We are leery of the hard and enamored of the soft.

We sense that the education system is not doing its job; that it is broken and needs fixing. But how, we are not sure. We are sure, though, that we are going to change it.

We sense that we had the dynamic wrong in foreign affairs; that change at home, like toppling a generation of political leadership, is desirable, while toppling leaders abroad is a fraught undertaking, as with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

We feel less good about the wealthy, and we are less sure that there are secure places for us in the future. We watch cooking shows and order in pizza. We gave up smoking and started jogging. But we are, so to speak, deaf to the damage we are doing to our ears with incessant music piped to them by earbuds.

We are more nationalistic and less confident at the same time. We treasure our values more, and wonder about their long-term durability.

The largest contradiction that can easily be inspected is in the themes of Trump and Sanders: Trump has rehabilitated a kind of racism aimed at immigrants, while Sanders has made the taboo word “socialism” acceptable in political dialogue.

The desire for change has moved from a slight wish to a hard desire for a new alignment. It is everywhere, from what we eat to how we feel about the climate. But we do not agree on this new alignment, hence the huge gulf between Sanders followers and Trump adherents. — For InsideSources

An Era of Emptiness Awaits Huge Change

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To understand empty in its physical enormity, fly over the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia: thousands of square miles of sand, untrammeled by man or animal. Awesome.

To understand empty as a metaphor, look at this past week in Washington.

Glenn Beck summoned his flock to the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday and offered them quasi-religious platitudes with a strong dash of patriotism: God and country. Empty concepts without a purpose to back them up.

The tens of thousands, quite possibly hundreds of thousands, of Beck adherents who filled the Mall already have God and patriotism. They did not come to be converted: They are the faithful, even if Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate with awful clarity, described them as self-pitying white people.

But the emptiness was not confined to the disappointing words from Beck, once Rupert Murdoch’s Man on Earth, now employed, it would seem, as God’s man down here.

On Monday, President Barack Obama made a brief — so brief it was almost furtive — appearance in the White House Rose Garden to push for tax cuts for small business and to chastise the Republicans in the Senate for bottling them up. Nothing new here. More emptiness.

Come Tuesday, it was the withdrawal-from-Iraq prime time broadcast for the president. But it had no passion, no conviction, no phrase to savor.

On Wednesday, Obama was back in the Rose Garden, talking up Middle East peace. Reporters are getting so used to this frequent use of flower power in the Rose Garden that many prefer to listen to the president from the relative comfort of the seats in the press center. In the East Room, reporters heard more platitudes about the hard path ahead to achieve peace.

It has become pretty hard just to listen to this stuff as successive presidents have sought to catch the ultimate brass ring of diplomacy. The “peace process” has become itself an empty formulation.

There has been such emptiness in the political debate that partisans are busy inventing bogeymen to run against. The gun lobby, which sends out incessant e-mail, has a whole series of horrors it has minted for gun lovers to worry about. Would you believe that, according to the lobby, Obama is in league with the United Nations to confiscate American weapons?

Others of the right see creeping “European-style socialism” about to get us. Being an empty threat, we are not told what this perversion actually is and how we would be able to recognize it when it gets here. Will it make us like England or France or Germany? One trembles.

On the left, where the hopper of ideas is as empty as it is on the right, there is paranoia and betrayal. Paranoia that the right wing and its insuperable ally, the Fox News Channel, are going to sweep into power, winning the House and Senate in November and the presidency in 2012, after which all the good things of the 20th century, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, mutual insurance companies and credit unions, will be privatized and handed over to the people who used to run Lehman Brothers. Reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, and maybe some civil rights legislation will be swept away as the country is ceded to a duopoly of oligarchs and fundamentalist Christians.

All this because these are empty times. These are empty years and an empty decade, where all the old ideas contend only because of the paucity of new ones.

This hollow sound and fury comes when, in really profound ways, the world, and especially our corner of it, is changing — or, to use the word of the day, being “reset.” Copper wire is being retired for wireless, paper for computer screens, oil for electricity. The global climate is changing. Europe has become China’s largest market. And the oldest currency of all, gold, is flourishing.

Only the desert is really empty and that, too, is an illusion — it is a live, moving thing with microbial life, shifting dunes and even fauna and flora that the inexperienced observer does not see.

Our political rhetoric is empty, vacuous and vapid, but things are happening. Profound, ignored changes are underway.

The Tea Parties: Add Sympathy

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Let’s pour the tea, and see who’s come to the party. More, let’s see why they came.

What binds these good citizens together in a ramshackle and loud fraternity known as the Tea Party movement? The focal point may be the Democratic health care legislation; but there is, as always with popular movements, a back story that is more complex and more compelling.

Could it be, to use Winston Churchill’s phrase, the sum of all their fears?

Indubitably. These are days of change, massive and irreversible change. Change that is undermining but difficult to characterize, and disturbing to experience.

The nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, is the symbol of that change more than he’s its author,

The Tea Party Patriots are people who feel that their lives and their nation is being swept forward to a place they don’t wish to go. They blame Obama and the Democrats for taking them there.

But the administration and the Democratic majorities in Congress have little to do with the buffeting the American image is taking.

Consider these facts:

 

✔ The United States has gone from the richest nation in the world to the biggest debtor.

✔ Our competitor, China, has grown rich in our market. Now China lends us money to cement the entanglement, while it becomes increasingly obstreperous.

✔ We have the largest and most lethal military machine on earth, but we can’t subdue insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, banish pirates in international waters, or prevail in sanctioning Iran.

✔ Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, crumbles. European trains hurtle at 220 miles an hour; ours crawl at less than a third of that speed.

✔ Broadband in the United States is many times slower than it is in Europe. This is cruel: We invent, they perfect.

✔ More than 10 percent, and possibly nearly double that, are out of work with no chance of employment for years. And new technology has made the skills of many of the unemployed obsolete.

✔ The United States is an English-speaking nation where a second language, Spanish, is creeping towards full recognition. Banks, phone companies and state governments have gone bilingual.

✔ Immigrants, legal and illegal, are changing the culture.

After 43 white, male presidents, there is a black man in the White House and a first family that reminds middle-class white tea partiers that huge changes are afoot.

A general anxiety has crystallized into a particular rage.

In memory, the 1950s have been sanctified as a time when all was well in America–if you were white and not serving in Korea. The United States was strong, the land was fertile and fear was concentrated on the Soviet threat.

As it had been in World War II, the good guys were us and the bad guys were them. The European empires were disappearing and we were the city upon a hill. Tea Party Patriots’ nostalgia for the 1950s is as pretty and disingenuous as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

The tea partiers may not be interested in the new demographics and new realities of the 21st century, but their anger won’t banish reality.

Trouble is the only political home these genuinely worried people can find is on the right: the overstated, overwrought and over-simplistic right. The right of Mark Levin and Glenn Beck.

These polemicists have concentrated the anxiety of tea partiers into a fear of socialism. It’s the undefined dark at the top of the stairs, the threat to liberty, to gun ownership and to private enterprise, according to the fear merchants of the right. Yet, there is precious little government left in the world that can be described as socialist.

The old socialism, with the nationalization of the means of production at its core is dead, sent to its eternal rest in Europe. Only a few leaders. like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, still espouse it.

Already extremists of the right–with death threats and property damage–are undoing the legitimacy of the entire Tea Party movement, and its unlikely members–the well-heeled, well-fed, well-insured but very sympathetic and very fearful activists.

Their fears deserve a hearing individually and in sum. Instead, they’re being exploited and in time they’ll be marginalized, discredited by the company they keep. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Hey Dick, Add a Spoonful of Socialism to Your Tea

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MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — The English like to say, from an old music hall song, “a little of what you fancy does you good.”  Well, so does a smidgeon of socialism.

Shock horror! Alert Dick Armey, inform Rudy Giuliani and let Rupert Murdoch know. Heresy is dangerous, and the correct authorities should be informed.

Like most people who rail against European socialism, those three have been the beneficiaries of some largesse that might be described as socialistic.

Armey, who is leading the tea bag revolution and who talks of the socialist threat as though a fleet were coming up the Potomac to sack Washington, is the beneficiary of the rights, honors and money that come from being a former congressman, all the way down to a handsome health care package.

Then there is Giuliani, who presided over the second most liberal city in the United States, after San Francisco, added to its amenities and improved America’s largest subway system. Notably, he did not end rent control, now known as “rent stabilization,” nor did he end a plethora of liberal services available in New York. Yet if the former mayor, who wanted to be president, wants to denigrate something, he utters the “s” word.

Murdoch is special. He has played footsie with the Gordon Brown Labor government in London; played up to the Communist Chinese; cooed over the Clintons and booed ideas of assistance to the media; and employed a staff at Fox Cable News who are devoted to castigating Europe and its left-of-center democracies. Worse, Murdoch has benefitted over the years from various government subsidies including the Commonwealth Press Cable Rate, which moved news inexpensively around the world before the Internet. And he has never cried out against second-class postage, another huge government subsidy to publishers.

OK, socialism, even the mild kind favored here in the Netherlands, isn’t the promised land of governance; but it produces, at the street level, some pretty agreeable result. Scads of American visitors groove on the country’s parks, public toilets, bike paths and buses that are easy to use.

This small city of about 200,000 bears its medieval history with pride and its socialist amenities with grace, from miles of bike paths to trains that can whisk you to the next hamlet or to Hamburg, Germany.

Travel to a nearby major city, like Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris, and Europe is yours with its high-speed trains that crisscross the continent at 200 mph, and even plunge under the English Channel to London’s St. Pancras Station, a masterpiece which has been restored to its Victorian glory.

London itself adds public amusements with pride. Three recent ones are the Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye; the foot bridge across the Thames, nicknamed the “wobbly bridge”; and the New Tate, an art gallery in an old power station.

You can put this down to the kind of post-socialism that former British prime minister Tony Blair (a Murdoch man) described as “social-ism;” not the old-school, “Keep the Red Flag Flying” socialism, but the idea that people are entitled to services beyond national defense. A good question for Giuliani might be: “Would you have approved the building of Central Park?”

Where socialism–lite has failed in Europe is in an excess of regulation, particularly the rigidity it has brought to hiring and firing. This has kept small business in Europe operating at the mom-and-pop level, scared to hire because in most European countries firing is subject to a labor tribunal’s approval. Approval seldom comes.

One of the great drivers of entrepreneurism in the United States is the harsh but effective idea that employees serve “at will.” That, the socialists can’t stomach. They want Paradise enow.

A little socialism will do–and we needn’t mention single-payer health care.

 

Obama Diagnosis, Won’t Prescribe

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President Barack Obama starts from a pretty compelling argument: In the rich industrialized nations, the rich and the poor should be able to afford to get sick. They surely will. Disease does not means test.

 

But after that, the health care argument gets away from the president. In fact, he hasn’t made his own argument.

 

This week Obama has argued passionately for reform, as he did in his prime-time news conference Wednesday night. But we have yet to hear his personal view of what an American health care system should look like. One suspects that it is the solution that dare not speak its name: a single-payer system, a government system. Yes, a–dread word–socialist system.

 

The empirical evidence from Australia to Ireland, Canada to Norway is that this is the way to go. Every country with a national health service pays less for health care per capita than does the United States. And not one has contemplated canceling their system.

 

Yet it is a concept that may be too radical for Americans. It also may be too late in the evolution of the health care industry to nationalize the system.

 

Canada had the most difficulty nationalizing health care of any major country, and is still groaning. Canada did not plunge in; it waded into a state system, and put it all together in an age of sophisticated medicine. But it is not without problems: for example, Canada failed to comprehend that if everyone who needs to see a doctor sees one, more doctors will be needed. There is a chronic shortage of doctors in Canada.

 

Britain, by contrast, nationalized its health system after World War II, when medicine was simpler and the process was easier. It was also a time of post-war idealism. Today, like most state systems, it functions well enough but not perfectly. Well enough for Britons living abroad, including in the United States, to fly home for major surgery.

 

The world of single-payer does allow for private insurance, and it is flourishing in countries like Ireland. This provides a second tier for those who feel the basic system is too rudimentary. Under this arrangement if you want a procedure for a non-life-threatening ailment, which would require a long wait in the state system, you visit the specialist–called a consultant in the British Isles–and the insurance company picks up the tab. The idea is that the well-off get what they want, and the rest get what they want.

 

Obama’s problem is that he can diagnose the problem but has failed to prescribe a solution that he appears to believe in. He is waiting for Congress to produce something that he can sign onto, called reform, and that will not expand the budget. Where European and some Pacific countries have allowed private systems to piggyback on state systems, Congress is struggling with the reverse and the president is going along. Congress is planning to have the state piggyback on the employer-paid system.

 

The idea that employers should carry the health care burden probably goes back to the 19th century when railroads, coal mines and ships found it best to employ a doctor to keep workers on the job. Today, it is an incongrous burden on American firms in an age of globalization.

 

The three principal schemes for a new day in health care seek to preserve private insurance as primary, mandate portability, demand that commercial insurers do not reject pre-existing conditions, and provide some kind of safety net from the government. And, yes, the whole new edifice will be revenue-neutral.

 

At his press conference, Obama was ebullient, funny at times–the very picture of a man about to get what he wants. By contrast, in the halls of Congress, the lawmakers who are supposed to deliver this package are despondent. They do not know what the president will accept and are not persuaded that huge federal spending will not result. There is real political fear on Capitol Hill. Wednesday night did not allay it.

 


 

 

 

 

Girding Against a Non-Existent Enemy

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There is a new growth industry in Washington; one which will consume hundreds of millions of dollars before it has run its course, and one that is not needed. No, it is not a new government program. It is a new private sector movement to save capitalism, and it is spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce.

The Chamber has committed to raise and spend $100 million on an across-the-board effort to fortify capitalism through media and public affairs campaigns. It will be a big payday for public intellectuals who can whip up an audience about the incipient resurgence of, well, communism, socialism and maybe even monarchy.

Anyway government in general, and the administration of Barack Obama in particular, is sure to figure as the merciless opponent of capitalism, seeking to regulate it and nationalize it out of existence. Only Asia, it would seem, is immune from government’s dead hand. There, in the mythology of the times, governments work for capitalism, as with the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the global reach of China.

 

To be believe this you have to swallow hard and affirm that bureaucrats of Asia are oh-so-smart, while those of the United States and Europe are stupid, incompetent and out to promote failure.

 

The Chamber, one hastens to point out, is not the villain here; it is, if anything, the victim. A lot of Chamber members really believe that capitalism is endangered by the Obama administration and its preparedness to intrude into markets. This belief has been fed, this paranoia has been indulged by the far-right wing and its protagonists in the blogosphere and broadcasting.

 

The fact is that capitalism–the world of willing buyers and willing sellers–has been around since the dawn of human history. It is as natural, as native, as fundamental to human society as the quest for God or the organization of the family. Probably as old as the market itself are the rogues who distort the market for excessive gain. Christ did not throw the moneychangers out of the temple for praying too fervently. Nor did Lehman Brothers collapse because it was timid about leverage.

 

Equally, capitalism has had an historic problem with social justice. No less a philosopher of capital’s virtue than Irving Kristol, inventor of neo-conservatism and father of its proselytizer, Bill Kristol, has pointed out that capitalism would not find fault with slavery or worker exploitation. Other institutions must seek that rectification. In Kristol’s words, “Two cheers for capitalism.”

 

Capitalism’s great enemy was, of course, Karl Marx and his collaborator,

Frederick Engels (Lenin was an adapter). But after much struggle, communism, or anti-capitalism, failed abysmally. It was the worst social and economic experiment ever and its few remaining adherents, like Cuba, are themselves economic and social failures.

 

Daniel Yergin, author of “Commanding Heights,” makes the point that capitalism has swept away any thoughts that communism has a future. Yergin’s commanding heights are controlled by capitalist nations.

 

Yet the fear that the armies of controlled economies are on the march still haunts many business people, who should know better. There is plenty of irony to go around in this fight against nothing.

Health care is the Trojan horse of those who see the enemies of capitalism on the march. Ironically, it is the Chamber which has called for manufacturers to be saved from the burden of health care. It has also called for normalization of relations with Cuba and a national gasoline tax.

Capitalism is not in danger. Even Britain’s venerable Labor Party had shed most of its socialist principles to compete and win under Tony Blair. The great writer H.G.Wells, one of the fathers of science fiction (“War of the Worlds”), predicted that socialism would defeat capitalism because it was a system and capitalism was not.

Wells had it exactly wrong. Capitalism is a dynamic system and socialism or its extreme, communism, is not. –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

Fighting the Socialist Straw Man

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Don’t look now, but there’s a monster hiding in the attic; or is it crouching behind the garden wall? Maybe it’s lurking with a troll under the bridge? There are a growing number of Americans who think that socialism is a threat to our free-market economy.

 

Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will commit millions dollars—maybe as much as $100 million–to a long-term campaign to teach the verities of capitalism and free markets.

 

“Supporters and critics alike agree that capitalism is at a crossroads,” said U.S. Chamber President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue, “It’s time to remind all Americans that it was a free enterprise system based on the values of individual initiative, hard work, risk, innovation, and profit that built our great country. We must take immediate action to reaffirm the spirit of enterprise in America.”

 

In his statement, Donohue did not mention socialism; but the implication is that it is coming in with the policies of the Obama administration.

 

Indeed, President Obama has not been squeamish about government intervention in the market. The economic stimulus package, the bailout of the banks, General Motors and possibly some states, the wishful “green”energy bill on Capitol Hill, and, front and center, health care reform all add up to a fear by many Americans that the United States is headed toward European-style democratic socialism.

 

The U.S. Chamber’s “Campaign for Free Enterprise” will feature a grass-roots movement, a “vigorous” media and public education campaign, focusing on the “economic literacy of younger Americans,” and issue-advocacy program, leading up to the 2010 elections and, of course, lobbying. It reflects a deep concern by the board of the chamber that the country really is heading down the path of Euro-socialism.

 

This concern begs the question: Is that so bad?

 

Putting aside those who think Europe’s social contracts of today are a kind of Marxism redux (they are not), what are the fears? Mostly, Europeans like their system and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finds the countries of western Europe out-score the United States in terms of national happiness. The socialized service most feared in the United States,

nationalized medicine, is both criticized, particularly in the United Kingdom and Italy, and loved. No politicians dare suggest privatizing it. The same goes for subsidized and pervasive public transportation,

 

The real problem for Europe is rigidity. Business has no freedom to act, and successive governments have mortgaged themselves to public service unions in country after country.

 

Margaret Thatcher loosened some of those bonds in Britain; but compared to the United States, business is still shackled in a way that would be hard to swallow here. Particularly, the American employment model is at odds with the European one. U.S. employment law is built on the concept of employment “at will.” In Britain, and most of the rest of western Europe, a fired employee can drag the employer before a labor tribunal and force an arbitration that usually will side with the worker.

 

This may be noble in concept, but it is devastating in reality. Even in good times, employers fear increasing payrolls. So permanent jobs are treated as temporary, and contract employees are favored over regular ones to protect employers from the rigors of hiring.

 

European governments do try to fix everything, and pass laws and rules to implement the fixes. I have heard social workers complain that they have to tell people who rip off the system how to do it more efficiently. In Britain, welfare, unemployment insurance, and other welfare-state handouts are known as “benefit”–and it can work like an annuity, especially in disability cases. I have heard British social workers complain that they feel complicit in abusing the system.

 

In Scandinavia the father, as well as the mother, can get a year of maternity leave, The “coddled society,” you might say. Yet as Harold Meyerson, a declared liberal, writes in The Washington Post, conservative parties embrace most of the same goals as the left-of-center ones.

 

Certainly cradle-to-grave Euro-socialism is expensive. It also stifles the business dynamic; business just has so much more to overcome to succeed and to survive in Europe. If you want to start a business, better do it in the United States. But if you want your opera produced, try Europe. Good and bad things come in the European package.

 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will get something for its efforts and its money if it admits that the door to more government was opened not by incipient socialists but by the excesses of capital managers, and that the threat to American business is wrong regulation not regulation itself. The specter of socialism in the U.S. context is a political device to frighten the gullible. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The French Connection: Bashing an Ally

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France really got it in the neck last weekend. Mon Dieu! On the great tea bag dumping day, Dick Armey, once House majority leader, warned us against creeping socialism and revealed his great fear: “I don’t want to be France.”

During the jolly protest against one-was-not-quite-sure-what, it became apparent that there is fear and trembling somewhere in the right wing (the French gave us left and right as a political division, based on the left and right banks of the Seine River in Paris) that the Republic, and all it stands for, will be subsumed by French values if the wanton spending of President Barack Obama continues.

This is serious stuff, and we should be on our guard. Next thing you know, our supermarkets will be filled with hundreds of unpasteurized cheeses (Pasteur was French, but he never persuaded his countrymen that unpasteurized cheese could be lethal); our women will be wearing haute couture; and tres fast, comfortable trains will be whipping us between cities. Boeing will be merging with Airbus and small, efficient cars will be rolling out of Detroit.

Worse, our culture will be trashed. NASCAR will give way to Le Mans. And our schoolchildren will be corrupted by learning that Toqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” was French; as was Lafayette, Rochambeau and many other heroes of the Revolutionary War. Worse still, they will learn that it was not the French but the perfidious Brits who necessitated the Boston Tea Party in 1773; and those same awful monarchists burned the White House in 1814.

It was the French who gave Jefferson a deal on Louisiana, and the British who held onto Canada.

France just does not get a sympathetic hearing in the United States. The problem is not enough French passed through the Port of New York at Ellis Island. They gave us the Statue of Liberty, but were not front-and-center among the immigrants. Ergo there is not a large Franco-American organization to cry foul when the country, that stood by us many times when it counted, is slandered by Francophobes like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. Remember, O’Reilly organized a boycott of French goods and services during the Second Gulf War. Mercifully, it was ineffective. Remember also that the French contributed 93,000 troops to the First Gulf War.

Behind the French bashing is a belief that France, which leads the world in railroad technology, nuclear power and has a vigorous defense manufacturing base, is a cesspool of socialism. It is an act of faith on the right that this ill-defined malady, socialism, has had France by the throat since the country withdrew from Algeria under President Charles de Gaulle. In fact, since the present French constitution–the Constitution of the Fifth Republic–was adopted in 1958, only the Mitterand government was really socialist. Only 15 out of 50 years of recent government have been left-of-center. The rest have been center or right-of-center, as is the case now with Nicolas Sarkozy.

However, France does have a statist problem. The blame lies not with its Communist Party and its left-of-center deputies, but with its education system and its prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration, created by de Gaulle to democratize access to the senior civil service. This system puts the best-and-the-brightest of French youth on a career path toward public service.

If you put all your talent into government, they will do what talent otherwise would do in the private sector: grow the company. In France’s case, the state has been grown by people who were educated to that as a patriotic duty.

Ergo, social services are very complete in France–truly extending from the cradle to the grave. But France cannot afford its social contract anymore. Globalization has made the French state, comforting as it is for the French, unaffordable. Couple that with low birth rates and aggressive trade unions and France has a dark cloud over its future: the same dark cloud that hangs over the United States, Japan and Germany, for instance. Maybe, it is a little darker in France because of its public service unions. Vive la difference, but it is not that great.