the Europeans have one of the best health care systems in the world but they can't afford it, we certainly can't afford it.

So now the US has become a second-rate country that can't affford the basic services essential to life that places like France have?

Well, interesting for you to admit it.

The truth of course is that the US can't afford what have now, as even staunch conservatives are now admitting. We pay more for health care than France and get far less for it, which I can attest to from experience.

France has to make adjustments to its health care system, but your turning that into implying that they have to throw it out entirely ("they can't afford it!") is disingenous nonsense.

You subject line was charming, by the way. Your manners in polite company must make you a big draw at parties.

Lose your job? Start your own biz. Yes, that oversimplifies things

You think?

The failure rate among small businesses is enormous. That is, most of them fail.

I know where this is coming from, believe me. So many in France I knew were frustrated about the burdensome system and they'd run off to UK to start busineses. Except that I also knew people who did this and ended up coming back to France after learning what life was really like in the UK, living five to a tiny apartmenet hours outside of London, taking hours to get to their Starbucks gig, and the dreams of instant business ownership and fast track wealth were dashed, in many cases.

In some, it wasn't dashed.

This whole thread smacks of hyperbole and absolutism. Yes, many in Europe are held back by the traditional system but what they imagine about how much better it is in places like the US is often based on woefully inflated fantasies, and ignorance about the very real dangers of our style of capitalism.

There was less talk of those dangers, of course, until just recently. Anyone now however who tries the old "Hey, it's easy, it's great, you just start a business and rake it in, everyone gets rich because there's little government regulation.." should be embarrased, after the past few months.

Each system has its advantages and disadvantages. The inherent problems with ours in the US should be all too evident right now.

Sorry folks, we're on strike.

Want to see a system that doesn't work?

Take the underground in Paris.

Really? And you take it every day, is that how you know this?

I used the metro for ten years, often daily. I've never seen anything in the US to rival it, and I miss it, actively, and say so often. We laughed at the strikes. And complained, yes, like every Paris resident has a god-given right to do. It's the national sport.

But it's a fantastic system almost all of the time, it whisked me around the entire city at will, and anyone who knows for instance the ultra-capitalist UK's systems should be ashamed to try and call it superior to the supposedly socialist French trains and metro.

What a lot of nonsense being peddled here. Clichés die hard.

Well, forgive me then, if after a long thread litted with right wing cliches about how inferior everything in Europe was, your writing basically "Yeah and the metro sucks also" and adding the "always on strike" cliche was not clear as a joke.

I get it now.

Well, or I take you at your word anyway.

I don't claim to be any expert, any French citizen would know more about life there than I do, despite the fact that I know it pretty well. I do however find it funny that all these armchair US residents who've maybe gone there on vaction know that it's all inferior because Rush Limbaugh told them that unemployment was 50% or that the taxes are 90% and so on.

I mourn the loss of critical thinking, mainly.

The author said that this is not the "great depression, but it's a depression". Whether you agree on that technical definition, saying "Oh come on, things were way worse in the thirties" misses what he wrote entirely, which acknowledged that that one was of a different magnitude.

More to the point, calling Robert Reich an "armchair economist" may be the funniest thing I've read here yet. How very Salon Letters that is.

Okay, well you got part of it right.

That's not a "conservative", but yes, that is a wingnut.

See, people like David Gergen are conservatives. David Brooks. Etc.

What you have here, with all of the conspiracy paranoia about the "media" (the mainstream media didn't cover Obama-Ayers obsessively? Please. And John McCain had any number of things that were simply never touched by the mainstream media, for example the way he abandoned his crippled wife for the current one. Was that covered in the mainstream media a lot, this aspect of mister "family values"? Hear stories about that one a lot, did you? Yeah, thought not. Give me a break) is a right wing crackpot.

Yes, it's an improvement over Paglia because this person is not pretending to be anything other than a right wing crackpot.

No, that's not saying much.

I knew that rang a bell.

Interim President on a "West Wing" episode, played by John Goodman.

Let's see, Goodman, good man....

Hmm, no clues there.

It's probably just Karl Rove.

Unless it's a joke, but as someone else said, that would only makes sense if it were funny.