Just because i'm 'right' of the dippers, doesn't mean i'm off the boat 'right' of centre...
It's not that you're right of the NDP that paints you as off the boat, it's the way you use the word socialism for me at least. In this thread you accuse the Scandinavian countries of being socialist. They're not, but that's a pretty understandable mistake as they are generally fairly left-leaning (practising what some would call a compassionate capitalism). You also accuse Greece of being a socialist state, which is a little less understandable, but I'll get to that later on. Inexplicably though, you accuse France and Italy of being socialist countries. I just cannot make sense of that. Basically, tossing around the word socialism the way you do puts you in the same Obama-is-a-socialist (or, to bring it closer to home, Soviet-Canuckistan) rightwing camp as our tea(bag?)-loving friends south of the border.
To get back to the Greek thing, it's interesting to me how short people's memories are. Just a few decades ago Greece was a military dictatorship. Similarly, Spain and Portugal, also commonly cited in this European-socialism-leads-to-economic-collapse argument, were run by fascists. The result was that all three nations were not all that economically developed when they joined the EU (unlike Germany or the UK). It took a lot of public investment to bring them up to the European standard, and strong economic roots do not go back all that far. A global financial crisis is all it takes to destabilize everything, no matter who's in government.
Compare the three countries above to Ireland. Again, just a couple decades ago one of the most economically backward nations in Europe. But then the Celtic Tiger roared its head. For the first time in centuries, Ireland stopped being a net exporter of migrants and became a destination for immigrants searching for a better life. Then the global economy fell apart, and Ireland's economy was one of the hardest hit. Can we blame this on socialism? I would like to see you try. Ireland's never been particularly left-leaning (leftist parties like Sinn Féin and the Socialist Party both have marginal support, while the nominally left-leaning and mainstream Labour Party has become more Third Way-centrist over the past two decades). The two main parties that have formed government for the past several decades, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are fairly centrist to righ-of-centre. Ireland became one of the most business friendly parts of Europe during the Tiger years, but as it became more developed, it's comparative advantages to the UK or the Continent began to disappear. Meanwhile, under-regulated banks fueled a giant property bubble that went bust. The result? Ireland, like Greece, Spain, and Portugal, has been hit hard, possibly the hardest of the lot. But how can one blame the "socialists" here, when there really aren't any?
I'm by no means an economist, and my analysis here may be quite flawed, but it seems to me like the common thread in all of this Europe-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket business is that the relatively under-developed nations that joined the EU in the 1970s-80s took way too many risks, chasing the too good to be true economic boom that eventually turned out to be exactly that - too good to be true. You can try to blame socialists, but you'd have just as much luck blaming Catholics (and some people have tried, what with their lack of Protestant work ethic and all).
And now that I've contributed to this exercise in veering completely off-topic, let's return to Ford and forget about all this rightwing rhetoric about tax-and-spend socialists destroying the planet (if it's at all possible to separate that rhetoric from Ford himself, I guess).