The French Illusions That Die Hard Free markets and ‘globalists’ didn’t wreck the French economy. The political class did.By Sohrab Ahmari
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-french-illusions-that-die-hard-1493925074
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.
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. CONTINUE AT SITE
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