France or America, Who is Calling Who Socialist?

Roger Cohen, who I gather spends a lot of time in France, wrote an interesting article in the New York Times a couple days ago. By his accurate perspective, the US and France actually are more similar than dissimilar.

Most (French) would be shocked to hear about American social security, let alone Medicare and Medicaid, the government-run health care systems for the elderly and the poor that together form one of the largest publicly financed health systems in the world.

Americans obsess less about France than vice-versa but when they do they tend to suffer from equally delusional ideas. The French — like many Europeans — loom as a feckless multitude coddled by a nanny state that’s so big it must be socialist.

In fact, ever since President Mitterrand tried broad nationalizations in the early 1980s with catastrophic results, France, like most of Europe, has been on a steady march toward freer markets, trade and competition. In its way, it has been Americanizing.

Both we and the French really know very little about the other, although ignorance doesn't seem to get in the way of our loudly voiced opionions of the other. The two countries actually have more in common than not.

Read the entire article here.