America is like France in many ways. The leftist political elite destroy the country they have to create a country that can never exist, and the fault lies with those they lord over for not wanting what they want. You'd think we could learn from the mistakes of Europe and avoid them. But no, the Tricords of this world think that they can do it better than everyone else who has tried and failed in the past. I wonder if "Missieur Tricorde" thought this as well when it was his turn?
The French Illusions That Die Hard
Free markets and ‘globalists’ didn’t wreck the French economy. The political class did.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon addresses his supporters in Paris, April 23. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Sohrab Ahmari
May 4, 2017 3:11 p.m. ET
2 COMMENTS
Paris
A representative of the globalist elite faces a tribune of globalization’s victims. That’s the superficial read on Sunday’s presidential runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in France. The deeper question is whether French voters accommodate themselves to reality or cling tighter to their economic illusions. Plenty of clues about which path France might take were on display during the May Day holiday.
Start with the France of illusions. An estimated 40,000 red-clad activists snaked their way from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation in the early afternoon. Hammer-and-sickle flags abounded. So did portraits of beloved mass murderers like Che Guevara. Gangs of masked youth set off firecrackers that boomed like gunshots.
One placard showed Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron side by side, asking: “Plague or Cholera?” A typical slogan was “Neither nation nor boss!”—a double rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s nationalism and Mr. Macron’s free-market liberalism. These sum up the views of supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand who was eliminated, barely, in the first round last month.
The Mélenchonists have a great deal in common with Ms. Le Pen’s National Front, which held its own angry rally earlier in the day. Both camps would lower the retirement age to 60 from 62. Ms. Le Pen would keep the 35-hour workweek while Mr. Mélenchon would shorten it to 32 hours. Both would boost welfare spending and sever or strain the country’s trade ties in various ways.
The Le Pen-Mélenchon Venn diagram has a large overlapping set, because both camps blame everyone but the French for the country’s malaise.
“The French try to erase historical experience,” Pascal Bruckner tells me. The literary journalist is one of a very few classical liberals among French public intellectuals. He says his compatriots “have forgotten the experience of 1989 and only see the bad aspects of capitalism and liberal democracy.”
The tragedy of France, Mr. Bruckner says, is that the country never had a Margaret Thatcher or Gerhard Schröder to implement a dramatic pro-growth program. Incremental, haphazard changes have only prolonged the crisis. “So if you’re unemployed it must be because of the market economy.”
Yet it wasn’t shadowy globalists who in 1999 imposed a 35-hour workweek to make overtime labor prohibitively expensive. The law was meant to encourage firms to hire more workers, but like most efforts to subjugate markets to politics, it ended up doing more harm than good. Now it’s the main barrier to hiring in a country where the unemployment rate is stuck north of 10%.
Nor was it global markets that levied a corporate tax rate of 33% (plus surcharges for larger firms), a top personal rate of 45%, and a wealth tax and other “social fees” that repelled investors and forced the country’s best and brightest to seek refuge in places like London, New York and Silicon Valley.
Nor did globalization build a behemoth French bureaucracy that crowds out the private economy. As of January, this has created a 98% public-debt-to-GDP ratio.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the recrudescence of collectivist politics in France is the willingness of some American conservatives to indulge it. Yes, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Mélenchon are intemperate and authoritarian, the thinking goes, but they give voice to real frustrations with globalization and other market evils like gentrification and automation.
If vituperation alone conferred political credibility, Louis Farrakhan would be the most credible figure in American politics. What U.S. conservatives tempted by Ms. Le Pen don’t notice is that much of her rage against globalization is the same old conspiratorial anti-Americanism dressed up for a new age of anxiety. It’s telling, too, that you never read about the 35-hour workweek in their accounts, which tend to make France sound more like America during the robber-baron era than a stultifying welfare state.
And what would happen to the unprotected if Ms. Le Pen became president? Within a year the country would become a European Venezuela, warns Mr. Bruckner. With her protectionist threats, “nobody would invest in France. Banks would close. People would withdraw their money and go abroad.”
Which brings us to the other France. It was also on display on May Day, when supporters of Mr. Macron turned out in droves to hear him speak at a convention center in northeast Paris. They were diverse, mostly young, well-dressed and well-behaved. The watchwords were opportunity, growth, aspiration, competitiveness and—yes—liberty.
Whether a President Macron turns out to be the reformer France needs remains to be seen. His platform is if anything too modest, and he has a tendency to speak to both sides of every issue. But give Mr. Macron and his supporters this: They don’t peddle dangerous illusions.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer in London.
The French Illusions That Die Hard
Free markets and ‘globalists’ didn’t wreck the French economy. The political class did.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon addresses his supporters in Paris, April 23. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Sohrab Ahmari
May 4, 2017 3:11 p.m. ET
2 COMMENTS
Paris
A representative of the globalist elite faces a tribune of globalization’s victims. That’s the superficial read on Sunday’s presidential runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in France. The deeper question is whether French voters accommodate themselves to reality or cling tighter to their economic illusions. Plenty of clues about which path France might take were on display during the May Day holiday.
Start with the France of illusions. An estimated 40,000 red-clad activists snaked their way from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation in the early afternoon. Hammer-and-sickle flags abounded. So did portraits of beloved mass murderers like Che Guevara. Gangs of masked youth set off firecrackers that boomed like gunshots.
One placard showed Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron side by side, asking: “Plague or Cholera?” A typical slogan was “Neither nation nor boss!”—a double rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s nationalism and Mr. Macron’s free-market liberalism. These sum up the views of supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand who was eliminated, barely, in the first round last month.
The Mélenchonists have a great deal in common with Ms. Le Pen’s National Front, which held its own angry rally earlier in the day. Both camps would lower the retirement age to 60 from 62. Ms. Le Pen would keep the 35-hour workweek while Mr. Mélenchon would shorten it to 32 hours. Both would boost welfare spending and sever or strain the country’s trade ties in various ways.
The Le Pen-Mélenchon Venn diagram has a large overlapping set, because both camps blame everyone but the French for the country’s malaise.
“The French try to erase historical experience,” Pascal Bruckner tells me. The literary journalist is one of a very few classical liberals among French public intellectuals. He says his compatriots “have forgotten the experience of 1989 and only see the bad aspects of capitalism and liberal democracy.”
The tragedy of France, Mr. Bruckner says, is that the country never had a Margaret Thatcher or Gerhard Schröder to implement a dramatic pro-growth program. Incremental, haphazard changes have only prolonged the crisis. “So if you’re unemployed it must be because of the market economy.”
Yet it wasn’t shadowy globalists who in 1999 imposed a 35-hour workweek to make overtime labor prohibitively expensive. The law was meant to encourage firms to hire more workers, but like most efforts to subjugate markets to politics, it ended up doing more harm than good. Now it’s the main barrier to hiring in a country where the unemployment rate is stuck north of 10%.
Nor was it global markets that levied a corporate tax rate of 33% (plus surcharges for larger firms), a top personal rate of 45%, and a wealth tax and other “social fees” that repelled investors and forced the country’s best and brightest to seek refuge in places like London, New York and Silicon Valley.
Nor did globalization build a behemoth French bureaucracy that crowds out the private economy. As of January, this has created a 98% public-debt-to-GDP ratio.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the recrudescence of collectivist politics in France is the willingness of some American conservatives to indulge it. Yes, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Mélenchon are intemperate and authoritarian, the thinking goes, but they give voice to real frustrations with globalization and other market evils like gentrification and automation.
If vituperation alone conferred political credibility, Louis Farrakhan would be the most credible figure in American politics. What U.S. conservatives tempted by Ms. Le Pen don’t notice is that much of her rage against globalization is the same old conspiratorial anti-Americanism dressed up for a new age of anxiety. It’s telling, too, that you never read about the 35-hour workweek in their accounts, which tend to make France sound more like America during the robber-baron era than a stultifying welfare state.
And what would happen to the unprotected if Ms. Le Pen became president? Within a year the country would become a European Venezuela, warns Mr. Bruckner. With her protectionist threats, “nobody would invest in France. Banks would close. People would withdraw their money and go abroad.”
Which brings us to the other France. It was also on display on May Day, when supporters of Mr. Macron turned out in droves to hear him speak at a convention center in northeast Paris. They were diverse, mostly young, well-dressed and well-behaved. The watchwords were opportunity, growth, aspiration, competitiveness and—yes—liberty.
Whether a President Macron turns out to be the reformer France needs remains to be seen. His platform is if anything too modest, and he has a tendency to speak to both sides of every issue. But give Mr. Macron and his supporters this: They don’t peddle dangerous illusions.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer in London.
