Often, a look at Europe is instructive.  They’re years ahead of us in the implementation of social democratic policies.  They have larger welfare states.  They have bigger governments.  They have single payer health care systems.  A look at Europe can tell us a lot about what is likely to happen in America if we continue down our current course of ever-increasing government.

So today, it was interesting to see that the president of France, Francois Hollande (a man with whom I’m not sure I’ve ever before agreed), announced he was planning to cut state spending by reducing state aid to companies and by getting rid of state commissions that haven’t proven their usefulness.

Here in North Carolina, we’ve been adding more and more incentives.  Yesterday I wrote about incentives for a wood pellet manufacturer.  Jon Sanders has written extensively about film incentives.  Everyone remembers Dell.  And government bureaucracy is constantly growing.

Hollande seems to have finally seen that the growth in government can’t go on forever.  Maybe, for once, we should take a lesson from France, and cut state spending by eliminating incentives and bloated bureaucracies.