LETTER FROM PARIS: Celebrating 70 Years of Socialism
Harriss, Joseph A.
LETTER FROM PARIS JOSEPH A. HARRISS Celebrating 70 Years of Socialism I T IS HARD TO ARGUE with Nicolas Baverez when he calls France "the sick man of Europe." You can feel malaise in the...
...But French socialism's worst price is in the tragic waste of human potential, in frustrated dreams and spiritual discouragement...
...With the unemployment compensation system handing out $33.6 billion a year and little effort made at enforcing the rules, defrauding it is a cottage industry...
...France came down with the socialism virus just 70 years ago this spring with the election in 1936 of the Socialist-Communist Popular Front government of Premier L~on Blum...
...As far as the shrugging Gaul in the street is concerned, socialism seems to offer great perks...
...If they have to work, the French today want to be civil servants if possible, the top career goal of three-quarters of the young...
...It's an aberration to think that the solution to every problem is to spend public monies and hire more civil servants...
...To his credit, Premier Dominique de Villepin has made employment his priority...
...a recent best-seller tells how to do the least possible on the j o b - t h e mandated 35-hour work week allows for some serious vacationing...
...Contrasting French decline with the democratic vitality and technological advance of the U.S., he declares that "France is the only developed country that strains to keep the obsolete, 1960s model of a closed and dirigiste economy...
...After his election in 1981 he joyfully embarked on a two-year rampage of ideologically based nationalizations in industry and finance that came close to ruining the economy before market reality took over...
...Labor legislation running to 2,631 pages designed to protect jobs actually does the opposite...
...The more adventurous simply leave: nearly one million French men and If they have to work, the French today want to be civil servants if possible, the top career goal of three-quarters of the young, if not, being jobless is the next best...
...Still it managed to push through entitlement and nationalization programs that put France on the road to socialism...
...Short of a virtual revolution, that rules out a truly free labor market and the invigorating sense of opportunity that goes with it...
...LETTER FROM PARIS JOSEPH A. HARRISS Celebrating 70 Years of Socialism I T IS HARD TO ARGUE with Nicolas Baverez when he calls France "the sick man of Europe...
...If not, being jobless is next best...
...His book, The Fearful Society, maintains that for decades the French have felt that their chances for a better life and future are shrinking, leaving them depressed and frightened...
...The French pay dearly to make L6on Blum's dream a reality...
...Because it's so fiendishly difficult to fire, companies hire as little as possible...
...The more imaginative create shell companies that then fire them...
...Some French economists actually twist themselves into calling the country's "social model," with its high unemployment and low growth rate, "a Soviet model that works...
...He is, after all, up against 60 million timorous, change-resistant Frenchmen, each digging in his heels to keep his entitlements...
...Some find ways not to pay...
...We would have a great struggle by the citizens, full mobilization of the population...
...I ~ -T ITH EASTERN EUROPE AND CHINA shedding ~ / ~ / their collectivist past as fast as they can, ~' t' France is one of the last places where people still believe government knows best...
...It's our entire way of thinking about employment that must change," he says...
...We would never let social progress stop...
...The Communist Party nostalgically vows it would finish what Blum started, "if, happily, the left became the majority again," as CP Secretary General Marie-George Buffet wistfully puts it...
...With work a four-letter word, a necessary evil at b e s t - the French work some 300 hours less a year than Americans...
...Such symptoms speak for themselves: France has a bad case of chronic socialism...
...But if that isn't enough, they can resort to abundant sick leave, on doctor's orders of course...
...The Socialist Party plans to commemorate the 70th anniversary with all due rhetorical pomp...
...In creating a fraud-based society, French socialism is indeed "a Soviet model...
...Joseph A. Harriss is a Paris-based American journalist whose latest book is About France...
...direct paycheck deductions amount to a similar percentage...
...Baverez best pinpoints the root cause of France's sickness...
...Others decide to live on the dole or opt out entirely--France boasts Europe's highest suicide rate among the young...
...His 14 years of preaching inalienable entitlements, his demonization of capitalism, his scornful references to investors as "people who get rich while they sleep" further locked France into 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 JOSEPH A. HARRISS a socialist mindset...
...Baverez, a top corporate lawyer and economist and author of the best-selling France in Decline, is one of a growing number of French analysts who warn that their country is heading for the wall...
...You can see it in the frequent, angry street demonstrations...
...women under 35 have headed for countries like the U.S...
...But Marxism has always fallen on fertile ground here...
...Wealthy Frenchmen are leaving the country in droves-one estimate puts it at one millionaire a day over the last decade, including members of 13 of France's 25 wealthiest families--to escape punitive taxes on success, particularly the wealth tax on assets over $875,000...
...APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...
...Welfare eats up nearly 30 percent of France's GDP...
...Even with energetic Communist support, Blum's government lasted barely a year...
...Studies show that about 15 percent of those are fraudulent...
...The left's other icon, Francois Mitterrand, set out to make France the most socialist country in Western Europe...
...Some dreams die hard...
...The average French physician orders his patients 2,882 days of sick leave per year...
...unemployment of nearly 10 percent, with double that among young people...
...But true to France's socialist traditions, Villepin has to try to square the circle by promising job security...
...and Britain, where they find more flexibility, opportunity, and appreciation of their talents...
...Under certain conditions, they permit companies to fire employees during their first two years...
...Today Blum is revered by the left as one of its patron saints...
...Another is Christophe Lambert, who keeps his finger on the French pulse as president of a big advertising agency...
...The temptation is great to pocket generous severance when fired, go on the jobless rolls, then work on the black market for double income...
...You can hear it when chattering class commentators talk of "collective despair...
...This wasting malady drains an energetic, creative people of their selfreliance, paralyzes them with fear of risk, and reduces them to a state of infantile dependency on the state...
...You can feel malaise in the atmosphere of anxiety and defeatism that hangs over the country like a shroud...
...Over opposition from the Socialists, Communists, and labor unions, along with noisy street demonstrations by students, he has rammed through parliament new kinds of employment contracts to try to free up the labor market...
...You can read it in the statistics: GDP growth of only 1.4 percent...
...Even the French hardly know what to do with a three-day weekend every other week, besides numerous weeks of vacation...
...exploding national debt of $ 2.4 trillion...
...Today polls show the French fondly consider the cynical, duplicitous Mitterrand--not De Gaulle, nor Pompidou, nor Giscard d'Estaing, certainly not Chirac--the best president in postwar history...
...Seventy years of socialism does that to a country...
...Thus highly qualified young people shunt, with dying hope for their futures, from one low-paying internship or temporary contract to another for years...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
