If you love big government solutions you look longingly
at France.
If you believe that we must, in the name of social justice, to tamp down
inequality by taxing the rich, you will be happy to know that the government of Francois Hollande has heard your pleas.
Of course, once the French run out of rich people to tax
they tax everyone else.
Will the real vampire squid please stand up?
The government of Socialist Francois Hollande has become the
poster child for a high tax welfare state government controlled economy.
How’s that working out? The London Telegraph reports the bad news:
A poll
on the front page of last Tuesday’s Le
Monde, that bible of the French Left-leaning Establishment (think a
simultaneously boring and hectoring Guardian),
translated into stark figures the winter of François Hollande’s discontent.
More
than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent
believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This
goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot
family or Chanel’s owners. Worse, after decades of living in one of the most
redistributive systems in western Europe, 54 per cent of the French believe
that taxes – of which there have been 84 new ones in the past two years, rising
from 42 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 46.3 per cent this year – now widen social
inequalities instead of reducing them.
The socialist mania for raising taxes has produced so much
uncertainty that it has become impossible to do business in France:
“It’s
not only that people don’t like to be treated like criminals just because
they’re successful,” says a French banker friend who has recently moved to
London. “But this uncertainty in every aspect of the tax system means it is
impossible to do business: you don’t know what your future costs are, or your
customer’s. You can’t buy, you can’t sell, you can’t hire, you can’t fire.”
The result: French university graduates, especially those
who have what are called “marketable degrees” want to leave the country. We are
not talking about a discontented minority. We are talking almost all of those
who can:
Today,
one out of four French university graduates wants to emigrate, “and this rises
to 80 per cent or 90 per cent in the case of marketable degrees”, says
economics professor Jacques Régniez, who teaches at both the Sorbonne and the
University of New York in Prague. “In one of my finance seminars, every single
French student intends to go abroad.”
“The
French workforce is now two-speed,” explains a headhunter who shuttles between
Paris and London. “Among the young, perhaps a third speak English, are willing
to relocate, and want to work. For one thing, their dream employers are the
more prosperous of the large French multinationals, almost all those in the
CAC40 index, who make over half of their profits abroad, sometimes over 90 per
cent – companies like, say, L’Oréal, Schneider or Danone. This is why French
universities have shocked the Académie française and now teach many courses in
English.
In many ways, this is the ultimate indignity. French
universities-- the pride and joy of a culture that touts its indigenous superiority at every opportunity-- teaching courses in English.
Unfortunately, more conservative French governments have not
had the will or the ability to abort this calamity. They might have wanted to
do so, but when push came to strike, they caved to the unions.
So many people are either working for the government or
living on government assistance that reform has become politically impossible.
Now, the French are discovering the hard way that they have sold their future
and their nation’s future for the promise of a free lunch, paid for by the
rich.
It looks like they are reaching the point that Margaret
Thatcher foresaw as the endgame of all socialist experiments: they are running
out of other people’s money.
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