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Rioters Burn French Social Model

by Christopher Chantrill
November 06, 2005 at 9:43 pm

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LAST WEEK Paris was burning. Now it is the little town of Evreux where 50 cars were torched on Saturday night by Muslim teenagers.

No problem? Evreux is 25 miles from Giverny, the home of Monet’s garden and its famous Japanese bridge. The garden was restored in the 1970s by American publishing heiresses.

After the Los Angeles riots in 1992 the French were supercilious. It couldn’t happen here, they sniffed. The French social model made such a thing impossible. But on Sunday after ten nights of riots, French President Jacques Chirac convened an “emergency security meeting” to address the crisis.

He could start by ordering the French pompiers to put out the blaze in the social model, a system designed to frustrate opportunity and job growth for the poor and the marginalized.

Inspired by the social model, the French have a very high minimum wage, about twice the level in the United States. Ten years ago, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress issued a bibliography on how the minimum wage “reduced employment,” “reduces employment among teenagers more than adults,” “hurts the unskilled,” “hurts low wage earners,” “increases the number of people on welfare,” and “hurts the poor generally.” The minimum wage is so high in France that supermarkets don’t hire people to bag groceries.

Encouraged by the social model, the French have extremely rigid employment laws that make it difficult to fire employees. As the consulting firm Triplet & Associés puts it, “employment in France is not ‘at will’… [and] dismissals are subject to stringent, and often bureaucratic, procedural statutory constraints.” This makes employers in France hesitant to hire permanent employees. They do hire interns, of course. And now the interns are starting to protest. They are getting fed up with serial internships but no jobs.

The French also have generous unemployment benefits. They have recently “slashed” them, according to Deutsche-Welle, from 30 months to 22 (compared to US state unemployment benefits that mostly last for 6 months.) Research on long-term unemployment indicates that the unemployed are hurt by overgenerous benefits. They lose skills while they are unemployed, and after a year, the skills erosion gets serious. So it is not surprising that Evelyne Zylbermann, 22 months after she last had a job, doesn’t know what she should do now that her benefit has been cut from $1,780 to $500 per month.

The French have always strongly believed in protecting French companies from global competition and administer a complex system of subsidies and preferences that privilege French enterprises over non-French, and producers over consumers. But researchers such as William W. Lewis in The Power of Productivity assert that the way to grow a healthy economy is by removing all privileges and subsidies for producers and entrenched interests: “Undistorted competition in product markets is essential.”

What about discrimination and racism? Surely nothing will change while the children of Muslim immigrants in the Paris suburbs remain underprivileged and oppressed? Actually, light to moderate discrimination is not much of a barrier to advancement. In New York City the Irish went from “No Irish Need Apply” and 50,000 streetwalking “nymphs of the pave” to respectability in fifty years and the Jews went from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe to Harvard in a single generation. Blacks in the United States made more rapid economic progress in the years before the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s than afterwards, according to Thomas Sowell.

The French are lucky. While they have been pompously digging themselves in deeper with their brilliant social model, we Anglo-Saxon cowboys have figured out how to dig out of the social model hole. For macroeconomic policy, set tax rates low and uniform. For the labor market, lower the minimum wage, unemployment benefits, and dodgy disability benefits. For the business arena, wipe out subsidies, rigidities, and privileges that distort the markets for products and services. But it is unlikely that the French are ready to bite the bullet. Not yet.

In the wake of the US riots in the 1960s the Kerner Commission called for “the addition of 1 million government-created jobs, the institution of a higher minimum wage, significantly increasing welfare benefits, spending more money on education and housing.” That was how the political elite in the US proposed to deal with urban riots.

After the “long hot summers” of the 1960s it took 15 years in the US to cut tax rates—in the teeth of opposition from the US political elite. It took a mere ten years before the US started deregulating transportation and telecommunications monopolies. But it took 30 years to reform the welfare system to put a time limit on benefits—in the teeth of opposition from the Democratic Party.

Why should we assume that the French are any smarter than we are?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

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Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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