Victor Davis Hanson’s justifiable suspicion that Obama and the Democrats have embraced European-style lunacy was beautifully illustrated by the news of the president’s spending freeze (frozen more like like a Squishee than a Slurpee, I bet). It’s a great example of a “solution” that solves nothing, something European politicians have refined to an art.

Last night, for example, Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy spent two hours on TV surrounded by eleven citizens handpicked by TF1 to ask him questions the answers to which every French person already knows. When one young woman told Sarko she couldn’t find a job, Sarkozy told her that unemployment was a problem. Le Parisien has some coverage.

The cover story in last week’s issue of Le Figaro Magazine nailed France’s dilemma pretty well: “Taxes: A Very French Folly.” The piece, a darkly humorous take triggered by the publication of a new book by former taxmaster Robert Matthieu, itemizes France’s latest goofy “special” taxes — 20 new ones in the last couple of years alone, on everything from lobsters to USB sticks — and the 450 loopholes that came with them. In France, tax laws are “reformed” even before the laws take place, a remarkable level of bureaucratic efficiency. The grotesque carbon tax ruled unconstitutional by a French court comes under hilarious scrutiny in the article.

After 60 years of rule by self-serving élites who represent a spectrum of political views from the crazy-left all the way to the center-left, France finally has taxed itself into paralysis. During Chirac’s administration, if you totaled all the taxes a French citizen paid, from VAT to taxes on fresh air, you were looking at a burden of around 70 percent. Sarkozy’s no Reagan; taxes are still monstrous.

French taxpayers are out of money, and the Sarkozy cabinet, which has even more énarques in it than Chirac’s did, is out of good ideas. All they have left to work with is bad ideas, and nearly all of them have to do with taxes. In France, there’s no more money for public spending and monetary policy has been outsourced to Brussels. So, “tax is virtually the only tool of economic policy that remains in the hands of politicians,” as Nicolas Jacquot, a former budget minister, tells the magazine.

In other words, “tax it” is apparently the limit of governmental imagination in France. Worse than “freeze it,” maybe, but not nearly as good as “cut it.”