There is another argument on the issue of comparative unemployment rates to rebut Krugman. The U.S. and European countries calculate their rates differently. We include involuntary part-time workers, while excluding discouraged workers, the nearly 2 million in prison, and the military. If you factored these in, you'd end up with a real unemployment rate of about 9%. Once the economic differential with France is narrowed this much, the social arguments have much more traction.
Joel Blau
He continues > If you don't want a society in which everyone is
desperately trying to get ahead in a zero-sum status game, you might
advocate government policies that slow down the rat race: high tax rates,
generous health and unemployment benefits, long mandatory paid vacations,
maybe even a limit on individual working hours. In other words, you might
want to turn America into France. But France has an unemployment rate more
than twice as high as America's, largely because of those same government
policies. <
