France and Greece Move Left
By William Shughart • Monday May 7, 2012 7:12 PM PDT • 3 Comments
Now that France’s incumbent President Sarkozy has been defeated at the polls by socialist candidate M. Hollande, Americans should have gotten a wake-up call. Angela Merkel now seems to be the only voice of European reason in the rising popular tide against budgetary austerity and a return to the by now old-fashioned idea that the public sector should live within its means.
President Obama and his Democratic predecessors argue that Americans should look to Europe for policies to emulate, such as single-payer healthcare plans, that seem to “work” there and that the United States should therefore mimic. Be careful what you wish for!
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, tried something like a single-payer plan, including individual mandates for purchasing health-insurance policies, as the Governor of Massachusetts, with predictably disastrous consequences for that state’s budget.
The rising global shift toward left-leaning governance leads me to predict that President Obama will be reelected in November. The US economy seems to be improving, based on recent estimates that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen from about 10 percent to 8.1 percent during his watch. But most voters are rationally too ignorant to grasp that that rosy scenario is the result of record numbers of job-seekers exiting from the labor force because they have given up searching for jobs in the private sector. Meanwhile, employment in the public sector and in industries benefiting from taxpayer-financed subsidies for “green” products and services has surged. Such “jobs” would not be on offer otherwise and, as even government statistics during the 1930s recognized, should not be included in the civilian labor force.
Personal liberty rarely has been in such danger. Vote in November as you want, but don’t do so expecting the proverbial free lunch. Benefits supplied by government must be paid for eventually, even if, as John Maynard Keynes once said famously, in the long run everyone is dead. But your children and grandchildren will not be.
Tags: Government subsidies, Great Depression, Socialism, The State 
I am not going to waste my vote on the two big socialist, statist parties, I am voting for Governor Gary Johnson and the libertarians. With the republicrats and the demopublicans government keeps getting bigger, more expensive and more intrusive.I’ve had enough of both!
phil mccanless | May 9, 2012 | Reply
Using Walmart generic medications, you could control your blood pressure and cholesterol for as little as $80 in a society that believed in personal freedom. In our present society thanks to prescription laws enforced by government. Laws that give doctors monopoly control over the supply of medicine, your cost is likely to be more like $380. This is but one example of how government rules and regulation make everything cost more!
Jerome Bigge | May 14, 2012 | Reply
Using good food and a natural supplement or two you don’t need to “control” your blood pressure and cholesterol. But that is another bone of contention with big government/pharma....leading you down the path telling you that you “need” these things for your health. What we need is free and easy access to REAL food (not fad pseudo food) and a government that doesn’t stand in our way of getting it by making it harder for small, local food producers to do business, subsidizing major AG companies that mono crop and use chemical pesticides and fertilizers, not requiring fake food manufacturers to label as such and going on record (FDA) stating that you, as in individual citizen, do not have the right to choose the foods you want to eat and feed to your family.
I’m not voting for Obama or Romney either as a vote for them is more of the same. I’m voting my conscience and it’s telling me to vote for liberty and Ron Paul.
Lynn Parks | May 16, 2012 | Reply