Posted on 05/11/2012 6:41:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The election of Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande to the presidency of France epitomizes the sorry state of contemporary democracy. By that, I don’t mean to imply that the French people should have voted for the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy. Neither would be capable of solving France’s intractable problems in a way acceptable to French voters, nor are the problems with democracy unique to France. To varying degrees they exist throughout Europe as well as here in the United States.
The first problem is: widespread economic illiteracy.
Hollande campaigned on a platform of economic growth and expanded job creation, to be accomplished by raising taxes on the rich and increasing government spending. Well, good luck with that one! Even Lord Keynes himself advocated lowering taxes rather than raising them to stimulate economic activity. And the record of net job creation via government stimulus is one of dismal failure. Hollande’s program can’t work, and yet a majority of the French electorate voted for it. How sad.
The second problem is the utter cynicism of today’s politics. One wonders whether Hollande himself truly believes his own campaign rhetoric. One senses that he knows that his socialistic policies would drive France’s struggling economy into the ditch: According to the World Socialist Web Site —who were cheerleaders for Hollande’s campaign promises of more taxes & spending—Hollande’s team has told Reuters that they are going to change course and “carry out reactionary policies … and intensify social cuts.”
The third problem is that people sometimes believe in fairy tales. Who knows what Hollande believes or understands about economics, but let’s give him credit for being politically astute. He understood that the key to electoral success is to tell voters what they want to hear.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
“Hollande’s Election Epitomizes the Sorry State of Contemporary Democracy”
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GOOD!!!!!
democracy is just the last step prior tp commie!
Now, REUBLIC! (a real one) ...that’s something else indeed!
Semper Watching!
*****
Excellent!
The French call themselves a republic. Whether it is a real one or not, we’ll have to see.
Excellent article.
“He (Hollande) understood that the key to electoral success is to tell voters what they want to hear.”
People who vote for a ‘living’ are being bribed with their own money. Raise taxes on the rich, they raise their costs of doing business. It’s a ‘fishy psycho’! (vicious cycle)
People at least need to know how to create wealth. Until they understand that a SURPLUS is needed, they will keep repeating the actions that will make them poor. (Debtism)
Yeh—lotta folks beating their chests and blowing their own horn calling themselves conservatives, etc, all the while badmouthing others as not “real” conservatives, etc.
Strange planet here...my last visit...
Semper Watching!
*****
“The biggest problem underscored by the French election is the degenerate state of modern democracy ... Democracy today is both childish and cannibalistic. It is childish in the sense that masses of people believe that if they want something, all they need to do is vote for it and they will get it—as if economic reality can be transformed by a mere act of will, and government can conjure desired benefits out of thin air. It is cannibalistic, in that so many have fallen into a state of moral depravity and pathetic impotence in which they believe that the only way they can have the comfortable life they desire is for government to take other people’s wealth and give it to them.”
AND THIS, FOLKS, IS EXACTLY HOW WE GOT A CLOWN LIKE BARACK OBAMA RUNNING THE COUNTRY.
I think the deeper meaning here is that the internationalists always assumed that nations and borders are arbitrary, and that as such, to create a unified EU would be just a matter of meetings and blather.
The truth is that the nations of Europe exist as such for very good reasons, and confederations, much less unity, take a very long time to evolve, and can only exist and be maintained, as long as they are both properly managed, and still allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits.
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