In case anyone skipped their daily dosage of news over the three day MLK holiday, it was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s turn to pillory Republicans for acquiescing to the unequal income distribution in the United States, and more generally to defend the economic glory that is France. The highlight of his column for me (a native Peorian) was his inclusion of a pretend dialogue of a husband and wife from my burg celebrating a French-style life of eating croissants, getting a full month of vacation and watching documentaries, although I cannot fathom what its point was—perhaps that no one should fear becoming more like France? I think the typical Peorian’s reaction was “gee, these Times columnists can be unctuous.”

Kristof was unwilling to do more than nod to the fact that Europe’s essentially kaput. While he acknowledges that Europe’s been living beyond its means for some time and has an overly generous welfare state it can no longer afford, he also comes to its defense with two problematic factoids that veer in the direction of agitprop.  First, he notes that Norway’s per capital income is higher than that of the U.S. and uses it to argue that the model can work in the right situation. Apparently that model necessitates abundant oil wealth–he fails to note that Norway has the same population as Alabama and produces about 3.5 million barrels of oil per day, and is sitting on over a half trillion dollars in the sovereign wealth fund that the oil revenue has been channeled to. While plenty of African countries have managed grinding poverty despite such wealth, most European governments can at least pull off a stable economy with that kind of head start.