Live To Work, Or Work To Live?

For the past thirty years, probably more, American diplomats reporting on the French economy have expressed amazement, usually in private, that French workers manage to live so well. The secret is that while they do pay high taxes, and seem to have comparatively lower wages, they get subsidies for all kinds of things from both the government and their employers (food, health, education, housing, you name it; go have lunch at the French Embassy cafeteria here in DC sometime—if you can find a valid reason for admission—and you'll see what I mean). It's why, for example, UK farmers are packing up and moving to France. And also why, at the same time, France has relatively more foreign investment than its neighbors. Subsidies across the board. The problem now, though, is that the French government, following the US example, proposes to restrict subsidies to corporations (they don't put it that way but that's what it amounts to). Here in the US, since we have a less than minimal collective understanding of the extent to which government and corporations canoodle over stealing from the public, it seems odd that the French people might object. Indeed, given our deeply engrained belief in the sanctity of 'the market' it almost seems sinful. Yet it's perfectly clear in France that if they follow the American model they can kiss their way of life goodbye.

Much is made, in the business press particularly but also in the mainline propaganda organs, of the putative frailty of the French economy. But a lot of the statistics, such as unemployment, are misleading to the extent that they miscount young people out of a job who nevertheless benefit from state sponsored higher education. I suspect that if a serious economist normalized for the main differences and did a proper count in the US workforce as well, that French and US unemployment rates would not differ appreciably. In any case, does it not strike the most hardened 'free-market' advocate as intellectually inconsistent, not to say dishonest, to tell younger French workers what's best for them when they clearly express their preferences in the opposite direction? One must assume they know something we don't.

And if French companies are doing so badly, then why are they busy buying US ones? Where, exactly, at a time of record profits among French companies, is the economic weakness the French government concerns itself with? The next time Prime Minister de Villepin lunches with his ministers will he, as he did recently during this crisis, dust off another bottle of 1940 vintage campagne? We may want to laugh at the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but they have a far keener understanding of class warfare and may well have the last laugh on us.