Apres Chirac, le deluge

Christopher Caldwell has a devastating piece in the Weekly Standard called “The Decline of France” about the economic, social and political descent of a once-relevant nation. Socialistic economic policies are driving the country into le crapper, the influx of Muslims is stoking France’s anti-Semitism, and a foreign policy of simply opposing anything that America proposes makes France look petty and irrelevant on the world stage.

I was particularly struck by this passage about the experiment to alleviate unemployment by going to a 35-hour work week:

The short week was meant to spread limited jobs around; it wound up doing the opposite, serving as what [“France Falling” author Nicolas] Baverez calls a "weapon of mass destruction for industrial production and employment." Today France has the highest youth unemployment in Europe, at 26 percent; only 37 percent of its over-55 population works, a world low. Its employment rate of 58 percent is at the bottom of the developed world. (The figure is 62 percent in the European Union and 75 percent in the United States.) And this grim employment picture is worsened--some would even say caused--by a political inequity. Over the past decade, public-sector employees have been able to enrich themselves in ways that private-sector ones cannot. Government employees can retire after 37.5 years on the job, versus 40 for private workers; they get 75 percent of their salary as a pension, versus 62 percent in the private sector; and the salary in this calculation is based on the best-paid six months for government workers, versus an average of their last 25 years for workers in private industry. So the latter wind up subsidizing the former.

The solution, of course, is for everybody to work in the public sector and increase the tax rate to 100%.