Joe points us to Sunday’s election results in France, where the Socialists won a majority in the Parliament, which will make it easy for President Francois Hollande to bring marriage equality to France:
France’s June 17 elections gave the Socialist Party of French President Francois Hollande a commanding parliamentary majority, which nearly assures France will become the next European nation to legalize gay marriage.
Hollande’s Socialist Party won 314 of Parliament’s 577 seats, giving the nascent president a free hand with which to enact his liberal reforms. The president can also rely on the support of 27 left-leaning candidates who also won legislative posts. Conservatives lost 111 seats in Sunday’s elections.
A Hollande administration backed by Socialist majorities means good news for supporters of France becoming the 12th nation to legalize gay nuptials.
As a candidate, Hollande pledged to pursue such legislation.
That’s great news, and not just on the gay rights front. Europe has been suffering under a number of nations’ newfound obsessions with austerity, which has just been exacerbating the worldwide economic crisis set off by Wall Street under Bush. One would think Americans might have looked across the pond and seen that austerity just doesn’t work in recessions/depressions, but the Americans who need convincing aren’t too keen on looking across the pond for any reason.
During the depression an austerity plan was tried in 1937 and set recovery back until WWII. Scary as going into debt is, the alternative is far worse.
Well good for France to get gay marriage, maybe. However, economically you are wrong, for, alas, it is the continued lack of austerity by governments no matter what the economic conditions that leads to recessions and depressions — once they start austerity is neither good or bad. That is, once bankrupt, saving money to lower your bills doesn’t matter anymore. Stop the endless debt & deficit spending before the recessions strike, and we won’t have them. Depressions are like bankruptcy, and the lack of austerity produces them. Alas, governments worldwide are profligate. As they continue to ignore austerity they will drive up inflation, which will lead to a bigger collapse.
No, Jim, just no.
Microeconomics and macroeconomics are two completely different things.
Jim, I agree with a lot of what you say, but I’m pretty sure that the Great depression was not caused by deficit government spending. And we spent our way out of that one, with world war II coming along to finish the deal.
We have no real commitment from either party in this country to curb our deficit spending or, if we are going to do that, to spend it on useful things. We bailed out the banks rather than hire teachers or police officers. We continue our two wars of choice, rather than stop the madness. Boehner spends millions defending the indefensible DOMA.
^that
Please remember everyone: The Free Market isn’t free. In order for this “free market” to operate, it comes at a cost. That cost is police and armed forces to preserve the peace; teachers and educators to create an intelligent and skilled workforce; safe and secure roads for easy transport of goods; courts to punish the rule breakers and provide justice to their victims; etc. If we lived in a true Ayn Randian society, none of this would happen and the “free market” would collapse.