The Trouble with France

“Gallois does not recommend reducing the size of the regulatory state which drains the private economy of wealth and innovative energy to finance the public sector on which political power reposes.”

He is an idiot.

The French govt is in a hopeless situation, truly dire:

A) They cannot reduce taxes quickly since that would increase the debt very fast; nobody believes that “growth” could take up the slack in the short term.

B) They COULD of course cut taxes if they cut expenditure, in other words, the size of the state. This is impossible in the short term (or indeed long term!), since it would mean sacking hundreds of thousands of their supporters.

So, they cannot reduce the site of the state without provoking union-led riots and possible social conflict.

They cannot reduce benefits for the same reason.

They cannot cut tax because the debt would soar and they’d lose their credit rating, putting up the cost of debt even more – welcome to the Greek death spiral.

It is indeed rather difficult to see what they CAN do, except leave the euro!!  A spot of “Blood, sweat and tears” might do it, but that is a bit too Anglo-Saxon to go down well over there. Nope – there is no “magic solution”, as Hollande naturally implied there was in order to get elected. His solution is of course to raise taxes and work less. This is a cunning plan which even Baldrick would label as lunacy.

Still, nobody should be surprised at anything from a party which introduced the 35 hour week in order to increase employment. A brilliant wheeze, though of course reducing it to 10 hours a week would clearly have increased employment even more.The entire political elite in the tweedledee-tweedledum parties that have held power for decades needs exiling to Saint Helena or somewhere so that someone else can take over. Nobody could do worse.

But people still keep voting for them! AMAZING!! Even in Greece they voted for the same venal, corrupt and cretinous mob that got Greece into this mess. As they are reputed to say in Yorkshire: “There’s now’t so queer as folks.”