I don’t know who Abbie Conant is but she posted this cartoon to praise socialism and own the cons. She seems a bit prickly, ending the post with:

“It appears that Facebook manipulated the distribution of the post to include hundreds of people who are not my friends and who have rather ignorant, rightwing views. At any rate, their comments provide an interesting view of the USA and the bizarre narrowness of its political spectrum.”

Being an ignorant right-winger, I felt her statement was invitation to inject a little non-ignorance to the discussion, so I tagged her.

Here goes.

The cartoon is clever, but it rests on an assumption that falls apart the moment you spend thirty seconds thinking about it.

It invites the viewer to look at Paris—Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe—and conclude that socialism must be responsible because France today has a large socialist influence in its government. That is like pointing at the Golden Gate Bridge and arguing that Medicare built it because both exist at the same time.

Almost everything that makes Paris instantly recognizable predates modern socialism by centuries. Notre-Dame was built by the Catholic Church beginning in the twelfth century. The Louvre began life as a royal fortress under the French monarchy. The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon. The grand boulevards of Paris were carved through the city under Napoleon III. Even the Eiffel Tower—the youngest landmark in the cartoon—was built by Gustave Eiffel’s private engineering company for the 1889 World’s Fair, decades before democratic socialism became a meaningful political force in France.

Socialists did not build Paris. They inherited it.

More importantly, they inherited the wealth that made Paris possible. The city’s monuments, museums, churches, bridges, and boulevards were financed by centuries of commerce, manufacturing, private enterprise, skilled craftsmen, merchants, engineers, architects, religious institutions, and, yes, governments taxing an increasingly productive economy. Whether one admires monarchies or not, the wealth that produced these works was created long before the modern welfare state existed.

This illustrates a common rhetorical sleight of hand. Advocates of socialism frequently point to prosperous Western nations with generous welfare systems as evidence that socialism works, while quietly overlooking the fact that those societies became wealthy before they dramatically expanded redistribution. The prosperity came first. The welfare state came later.

That does not prove that every social program is bad. It does expose the dishonesty of claiming credit for a civilization that others built. There is a profound difference between creating wealth and redistributing wealth that has already been created. The meme intentionally blurs that distinction.

If someone wants to argue that modern France is better because of its social policies, make that argument. But don’t pretend socialism built Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, or the Louvre. History simply will not cooperate.

Paris is not a monument to socialism. It is a monument to nearly a thousand years of religion, private enterprise, engineering, commerce, art, and accumulated civilization. Socialists didn’t build that city any more than Medicare built the Golden Gate Bridge. They simply arrived after it was already standing.