France’s new Socialist president wants same things Obama does

By David McElroy · May 8, 2012

Nobody is entirely sure what a socialist is anymore. Some people are convinced that Barack Obama is a socialist. Two years ago, Newsweek argued that both sides of the mainstream are basically big-government socialists now. And now we have a new French president from the Socialist party. So what do real socialists want?

It turns out that real socialists want pretty much the same thing as Obama and the Democrats do — more government spending, higher taxes on “the rich” and an end to planned budget cuts. Newly elected French President François Hollande says he will end “austerity” in the country, which basically means he’s going to take as much money as he can from productive people and spend like there’s no tomorrow.

Government spending in European countries has been so bad that the idea of reducing spending to at least start trimming deficits is called austerity. Just as is the case here, the people who want the spending to continue say that “the rich” have the responsibility to pay more — because people who are now being supported by government would have to support themselves otherwise.

The standard rhetoric in this country is to claim that those who want to balance the budget want to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” but the idea is the same. The idea is that those who are already being supported by productive people deserve to continue to get that support — and it’s “greedy” for “the rich” not to want to work hard and have their money confiscated to be given to other people.

A lot of people see socialism and fascism as polar opposites. They say that socialism is extreme left-wing thinking and fascism is extreme right-wing thinking. Even though the groups hate each other, I say they’re first cousins. They both want the same things. They just differ in how to go about it.

Obama isn’t a socialist. Not really. I’d say his programs are more fascist. The socialists like direct government ownership of companies, but the fascists like to simply control privately owned businesses so much that they’re required to do the government’s bidding. Nobody opposes Obama’s health care takeover any more than Ron Paul, and Paul effectively makes the point that the plan is fascist, not socialist.

But what do the labels really matter these days? What matters are the ideas and where those ideas lead. The ideas that Obama favors — and that the new French Socialist president favors — involve massive additional spending and higher taxes. You can call it whatever you want. Socialism lite? Fascism with hope and change? Whatever. The bottom line is that both sides of the mainstream favor essentially the same things. They only differ on how far to go.

The Republicans are in the process of wrapping up their nominating process, which is going to make Mitt Romney their candidate. (I’m sorry, Ron Paul supporters. The race is over. Seriously. You’re wasting your time.) And Romney is virtually indistinguishable from Obama on the major issues. Even the program considered the worst of Obama’s alleged socialism — what’s come to be called ObamaCare — was directly modeled on RomneyCare in Massachusetts. (RomneyCare was even more sweeping and oppressive.)

Whatever you want to call them, they’re all socialists now — all across the points of the political mainstream. They’re going to argue over relatively minor differences, but they’re unwilling to consider anything outside of that very narrow band of acceptable belief.

I obviously don’t agree with leftist linguist Noam Chomsky about much, but he showed great insight on this point when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

That’s where we are today. The two sides of the mainstream in this country aren’t that different on economics — at least when compared to ideas based in actual freedom. The two sides might argue about exactly how much is acceptable to steal from people, but they’re united in the firm belief that the theft is legitimate and necessary.

Incoming French President François Hollande calls himself a socialist. Barack Obama doesn’t, but he favors pretty much identical economic programs. His GOP opponents have spent the past four or five years pursuing variants of the same Keynesian nonsense, but with different rhetoric. When it comes down to it, how are they any better than the folks in France who admit they’re socialists?

The chorus we’re starting to hear from political pundits is that “austerity doesn’t work” and that Republicans have to learn from the lesson of the French voter backlash in favor of the Socialists. They say that because they want government to keep growing. They want it to tax and spend and borrow. So they’re going to warn Republicans that doing anything else “doesn’t work.”

They’re right about one thing. It’s ultimately not going to work with voters to tell them the truth about what has to happen. If anyone tells voters the truth — that spending has to be slashed, even spending that voters like — that person or party is going to lose. Voters are not willing to hear the hard truth that they can’t live forever at someone else’s expense.

We’re all socialists now. It’s not literally true — and it’s not true of very many people who will be reading here — but it’s close enough to the truth about the American mainstream. They argue about how far to take it, but all of the people who have any hope of really holding power are dedicated to continuing the same failed policies that got us here.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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