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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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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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