At least, that is the hope of Sarkozy:
In the 45-minute speech, Sarkozy declared the death of the 35-hour week, suggested that large companies may have to double or triple the part of their profit they are obliged to share with employees and vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare that he has commissioned from two Nobel laureates in economics, Amarthya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. He also said that he would put a state bank in charge of defending French industry against sovereign wealth funds and other financial predators.
Oh, and he plans on taxing various technology to help fund dying business models and poorly performing firms. That will surely help spur innovation and increase productivity.
See also: Happiness by Will or by Writ?
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Not to mention the shameful creation of a “Ministry of National Identity and Immigration”
Sarkozy is a joke. More proof that European ‘conservatives’ are socialists in sheep’s skin.
It is like taxing the railways, the cars and the bus and motor track industry in order to save the “good old” horse-drawn wagon, lorry and ox-wagon “industry”
It isn’t a joke it isn’t a ridicules thing it is pure insanity.
…and very actual from a so-called “right wing” European politician.
His Nobel laureates’s advisers are probably not complaining now, they being socialists in sheep’s skin too.
Euros regularly warn the US about the destabilizing effects of income inequality, but where have the riots taking place recently? In egalitarian France! Sarkozy’s plans mean higher unemployment for minorities and more rioting in the future. Poor France. But they deserve what they get for abandoning Bastiat.
“Way to throw away France’s competitive advantage in the new economy.”
I suspect it would take a Bastiat to translate this statement into “political French.”
“…vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare…”
The UN has promoted this sort of thing for decades. And guess what one of the measures is? Income equality. The Euros consider themselves so much superior to Americans because of their socialism, but I would rather be poor in the US than in Europe because our poor are so much wealthier than their poor. Plus our poor have a chance to become middle class while their poor have no chance of being anything but poor.
I always shake my head when I read about people who cannot wrap their minds around the idea that the person who takes the financial risk to start up a company should have the right to run the company as they see fit. At least the people here at Mises understand that if the employer pays miserable wages or has terrible working conditions, that the market will take care of it, because the employees will go elsewhere.
Then I reflexively recall my first encounter with socialist thinking. At the time I was only 13 and was not aware of the fact that it was socialist thinking.
Three of us were working in the school library. When we were done, I went to my wallet to get some change for the candy machine and noticed that $10 was missing. I couldn’t imagine where it had gone, because our purses were left in a secure place.
The next day, I saw one of the two girls with whom I worked and mentioned that the money was missing. She suddenly was unable to look me in the eye. Apparently, the third girl had taken the money while I was busy working.
The thief knew that I received $5/week as a allowance from my parents. When she looked in my wallet and discovered that I had $15, she decided that since it was more than I usually had, that she had the right to take the additional money. To her way of thinking, I was not entitled to the extra $10 when she had nothing.
I angrily replied that the additional $10 was birthday money, but that in any case, the girl had no business stealing from me. The girl looked surprised and then became upset. She said that if the other girl had known that it was birthday money, then she wouldn’t have touched it.
I had never before encountered this kind of logic, and so found myself to be speechless.
Knowing that the girl with whom I spoke would deny our having had the conversation…knowing that the thief had an infantile temperament and would anonymously harass anyone who got in her way, I decided to let the matter go and from that point forward, gave her a wide berth. I also knew that people like her eventually screw themselves up with little or no help from anyone else, and that is exactly what happened. While shoplifting in a major department store, both the thief and the girls who were with her were rounded up by security guards. Their parents had to come get them, and the girls were banned from the store. The girls in the group took the opportunity to break away from the thief’s controlling and intimidating ways, and so the thief found herself to be an outcast.
As I grew older, I understood that the girl was envious of anyONE who had anyTHING that she didn’t have. Take the situation with the library…she was envious of the fact that I had superior organizational skills and so was allowed to sit at a desk so that I could process and catalogue all incoming reading materials. Meanwhile, she and the other girl (who were slackers) had to work the stacks. She was jealous of the fact that I had an allowance. She resented my large wardrobe but refused to take into account the fact that I would purchase inexpensive remnants of fabric and wools that were on closeout so that I could sew and crochet all my own clothes. I would also lend a hand to a proprietor in our local village, and in exchange, he would let me buy jeans at his cost. In other words, I was a little capitalist!
As an adult, I now realize that envy is the root cause of socialism. As a matter of fact, there is a book in the Mises store about envy that I want to read.
@ fundamentalist
Nobody deserves his politicians…
Sarkozy is supposed to be right wing, just as Bush is… who cares?
Sure, the French suffer from their institutions but they are not a lost cause yet I hope… maybe just too complex to understand … like you Americans are in a different way.
Don’t forget that the French managed to come up early in Europe with the idea that privileges of the nobility were to be revoked in the constitution in order to make everyone equal in front of the law …
That was a good start… these political ideas of equality were all heavilly discussed in the first years after the French revolution, and yet interpreted very differently by Danton Marat or Robespierre. Robespierre really is the first “socialist” dictator… and yet he recommended for the first time in human history vote for every man, for “the jews, the comedians and the colored people” he also spoke in parliament against the death penalty, even for the King Louis XVI
Most political conception today is quite a bit inspired from that French republican idea.
thank god they finally gave the vote to the comedians. we were truly barbaric once.
this is the type of stuff that makes me not so bullish on the euro. It’s main quality seems to be it isn’t the dollar.
Well, here in Spain we’re not so happy with the euro, for inflation and socialist economic policies are really breathing over our necks. Besides, the country is divided into “autonomÃas” which only sum up taxes and public expenditure and, in some territories like Catalonia or the Basque provinces promote secession from central government in Madrid… just to create their own totalitarian governments. For example, public-founded education is not available in Spanish, only Catalan or Basque, which goes against the fact that most people use Spanish in their daily lives and a vast majority is bilingual.
Concerning what Artisan said, I think universal suffrage wasn’t a French invention. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it was Benjamin Franklin and John Adams who first proposed it for all male citizens of age.
Real universal suffrage was first available in Finland in the beginnings of the 20th century, as you know.
You can only have an approximate idea of what socialist policies have done in Europe. I only expect the coming recession tarnishes the prestige of these policies and, for once, a responsible Government applies a bit of Austrian economics in old Europe.
Here’s a Canadian example of the same thing.
I don’t know if this is common across the industrialized democracies right now, but in Canada I have noticed that politicians at all levels are going for broke – literally. In every large city the local politicians and unions are wildly out of control with spending and salary increases. Even in the smaller towns whose politicians are less inclined to be spendthrifts, provincial governments are forcing heavy spending burdens on them, for example to meet “upgraded” standards for fire, police, water, sewer, recycling, etc. As for the provincial governments themselves … in Ontario the industries which hire locals and sell in the USA are getting killed because of the sharp rise of the CAD relative to the USD. So what does the clown running the province do? Impose another statutory holiday on employers, basically kicking them in the teeth and telling them to get the hell out of the province and take their money with them.
The allegedly conservative federal government is running radio ads boasting about how it’s coming after industries who violate their (thankfully watered down) war on greenhouse gases. The local waste management company is running ads saying that 90% of all local companies are violating the new recycling laws, and promising that government is going to be “cracking down on offenders”.
The conservatives are chicken-hearted weaklings who are afraid to denounce the welfare state or defend capitalism (I said capitalism, not cronyism), there is nothing resembling libertarianism present in the political landscape (outside of a few Ron Paul meetup groups) and the up-and-coming generation of politicians in the leftist parties are deep admirers of Chavez, Castro, Che Guevara and even Josef Stalin. Support for the WoT is very muted here, as everywhere else outside of the USA, but the government is committed to staying in Afghanistan until every single piece of the equipment used by the armed forces is worn out or blown up, so they will have an excuse to go on a massive buying binge. More cronyism at work.
I see these trends accelerating right now. If I hadn’t invested in gold I would be feeling very depressed.
and, in some territories like Catalonia or the Basque provinces promote secession from central government in Madrid… just to create their own totalitarian governments.
Let them. Secession should always be at least tolerated if not actively promoted.
Totalitarians and other forms of socialists are no better than pond scum, of course, but better to have them exercise their thievery in a small territory than in a larger one.
With a smaller territory to rob and destroy, the effects of their economic stupidity will be more immediately obvious, since they will run out of people to rob more quickly.
For more understanding of French and German economics, check out this article at Foregin Policy: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095
Here’s the sub-head:
“In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.”
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