Centerfield

Good site...one to watch.

Howvever, his clear "right-leaning" centrism was evident. Don't get me wrong, that's more than fine. But, it did cause him to write an piece on the American Left's hypocracy towards France's immigration and labor troubes that I took issue with for being too cursory.

I looked for discussion of the CPE labor issue on DKos and didn't find much. What I did find was rather divided yet moderate. Besides that, I didn't see a lot of over sympathetic writing on the issue.

Whether it's a matter of priority or total point of view, I don't consider the Greater Left (or Americans in general) to be as preoccupied with economic liberalization on the most fundamental level as the Europeans.

Left or Right, Americans are more prone to lend sympathy to policies that promote economic dynamicism over fiscal order and stability. IOW, it's OK to rock to the boat to loosen things up and get'em moving. Whereas Europeans, as a whole, have more caution and fear about upsetting any sense of socio-economic order in the name of longer term abstract goals of growth, job markets and unemployment.

Ofcourse, these goals are not mutually exclusive and I'm not implying some iron-clad consensus.

However, looking at the CPE issue, that fact that we don't have such a law to alter says a lot...and if we did, our culture and mentality would lend to a better acceptance of such a law change...since our populism is not as pronounced and strong as the European notion.

I sort of disagree with your point about populism John. It's not that ours is less strong than in Europe, it's just different. America is a country where the stress is on individualism and entrepreneurship and much less on collective security. So our populism often takes a more "conservative" (in the sense of non-statist) form. In Europe, especially France and Germany, populism is more oriented toward protecting the welfare state and the European concept of social democracy.

I would argue that our populism is at least as strong as in Europe and perhaps stronger. For example, support for the death penalty is essentially a populist notion that is enshrined in law. In Europe, the death penalty doesn't exist even though there is significant public sentiment for it.

Point about Death Penalty taken.

But that's not what I mean by populism nor do I think it's what most people would mean.

We're talking economic populism. Besides, "not as strong"--"different"....same difference.

Europeans are more willing to take stronger measures to provide its general populace more socio-economic stability and predictibility. That means that economic legislation in general is more geared toward the welfare of society than it is here. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just a fact and it has pros and cons.

Our system forgoes certain socio-economic comforts and predictibility in the name dynamicism. Again, fact with pros and cons.

As a result, the more individualistic American economy is more dynamic, grows faster, responds to adversity better, carries less unemployment and leaves Americans with more buying power...most times. The more socialized European economy, is the opposite of all those things but leaves more free time, predictibility and security (especially if you have a decent job) and arguably a better quality of life depending on your tastes.

Neither system is perfect. I've always felt Europeans should shake things up a bit and forgoe a little stability to liven their economy a bit and lower unemployment so that can lower some taxes. As for us, I think some measures could be taken to coaxe a little better quality of life for more people at the expensing of taming our dragon of an economy a bit.