Remember when we wouldn’t even say French fries? But that was before Sarkozy. Now, Newt Gingrich says that we can learn a lot from France. But it was Newt’s analysis of the 2006 elections that caught my attention:
“Citizens had to choose between a left enthusiastically raising taxes to run failing bureaucracies and a right passively attempting to avoid tax increases while bureaucracies decay and policies fail around it.”
In diagnosing where we are Newt also writes about Amity Shlaes’s new book, “The Forgotten Man:”
The ‘forgotten man’ was a term coined by a great conservative pro-market, pro-growth professor named William Graham Sumner. In an 1883 essay, he asserted: ‘As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine . . . what A, B, and C shall do for X.’
“Sumner wanted to know about C, the one he called ‘the forgotten man.’ As [Amity] Shlaes explains, ‘[t]here was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C, his forgotten man, to the cause.” Sumner wrote of the forgotten man: “He works, he votes, generally he prays — but he always pays — yes, above all, he pays.”
Read the whole piece to find out how Sarkozy can help us.