April 18, 2007 – Euro-Statism is Just as Bad as Our Own

I was reading about the upcoming election in France and and this article in the on-line edition of the New Yorker captures perfectly the intransigent nature of the statist mind whatever its nominal political leanings or beliefs may be.

“The French” says the article, “are often accused of being trapped in their Cartesian categories. A cold sandwich cannot morph into a hot sandwich without considerable mental accommodation on the part of the person putting it together. In politics, the left cannot creep toward the center, let alone the right, without a deep, if not intolerable, sense of ideological betrayal. The right rarely even considers the possibility of creeping. Change, on the right, is more a matter of cosmetic surgery. For most of the French, the 'center'—call it a third way or Clinton’s way or Blair’s way or simply a free-market, social-democratic consensus—has been a contradiction in terms, perhaps because they remain so deeply devoted to the protective and protectionist state, l’État protecteur, that both the left and the right have helped create. The state has been reified, even deified; it carries the imprimatur of a historic compromise with reality.”

Yeah, right. Like reality can be “compromised with”, eh? The French really are different from us, but not as much as we think.The only thing states protect is their own power, privilege and prerogatives and if any actual good comes from it, well, that's just plain ol' luck or happenstance. The care and feeding of the state itself and its political base, always come first. And all this blather about “right”, “left” and “center” as a dynamic political continuum is just bullshit. Proudhon, Bastiat and Cantillon must be spinning in their graves right about now.

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