In what way is this a guilt trip? When you compare the US and the French system, you don't get to just say "well, they did it why can't we?" as if that questio

In what way is this a guilt trip? When you compare the US and the French system, you don't get to just say "well, they did it why can't we?" as if that question exists in a vacuum. We have a defense program which is a massive government expenditure -- which pre-empts other government expenditures such as single-payer health care -- so a fair comparison would have to look at the fact that the French had a de facto defense subsidy. If each country in Western Europe had been responsible for building up the kind of deterrent force which we were able to present, the calculus for a single-payer program would change. Certainly Force de Frappe was a strategic asset. Can you concede that without NATO (dominated by the US) the French investment in defense would have needed a drastic increase in order to fill that vacuum? If there were no NATO, at the least I think you can acknowledge that all of Germany would have been a Soviet client, putting France on a front line against the Warsaw Pact countries.