The United States of France?
Posted
Sep 23 2008, 03:12 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Our beloved nation has become the United States of France. At least, according to Time's Bill Saporito, who sees the signs. The U.S. government has nationalized the financial system, and is about to "quasi-nationalize" Detroit automakers. National health care is a hot discussion topic right now. You know where he's going:
"Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food."
It's a cutesy way of getting at a bigger question. What happened to the be-all-you-can-be capitalism that America was built on? Wall Street rode that horse for some time, enjoying the freedom of a largely deregulated environment and engineering all kinds of whiz-bang financial tricks. The system worked until it got worked over, by the bosses on Wall Street all the way to the homeowners on Main Street.
So the government has intervened with a very heavy hand, and Saporito says it might not be a bad idea if we adopted some of France's nationalistic tendencies. After all, the French aren't dealing with crushing personal debt, subprime mortgages or even college tuition payments (college is free). All they had to do was accept massive income tax rates and no job growth.
"So yes, while we're still willing to work ourselves to death for the privilege of paying off our usurious credit cards," Saporito writes, "we can no longer look contemptuously at the land of 246 cheeses."
Image credit: Beth Lieu Song, GNU Free Documentation License
