Published: Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009 / Updated: Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009 09:07 AM

Socialism, are you serious?

To hear some folks tell it, America is headed straight to socialist hell. Want to flee the coming pinko-palooza? Move to Europe, where despite the worst crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression, socialist parties remain flat on their backs.

Conservative German Chancellor Angela Merkel walloped socialists at the polls recently. In Britain, the governing Labor Party held its annual meeting amid widespread predictions of a coming Conservative Party rout. The French socialists? Moribund. And so on.

There's less here than meets the eye. Euro-conservatives are no existential threat to the welfare state. In fact, on health care, Tory leader David Cameron is to the left of Barack Obama. Rightist European parties only promise to do a more competent job managing the welfare state amid changing global conditions.

Red-scared Republicans may have forgotten that the greatest expansion of the federal government into the economy since the New Deal occurred on the watch of George W. Bush. Even before last fall's emergency, conservatives were no enemy of statism. “We may be the party of big government, but they are the party of really big government,” Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., feebly boasted in 2006.

Fears of creeping collectivism have been part of our political debate for more than 100 years. Conservatives are not wrong to be concerned about the seemingly unstoppable growth of the government. But our mixed economy and sacrosanct entitlements are political facts that not even Ronald Reagan meaningfully reversed.