France is reaching the end of the social democratic road. By Brivael Le Pogam.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
The promise:
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. …
The promise was protection. …
The result:
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The result is stagnation.
One more promise, one more regulation, one more bureaucrat:
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
Author’s illustration
Trust me. You don’t want to be France. …
Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.
What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation. …
The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you’re being offered is more of the same.
That’s the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears.
The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.
In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can’t afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.
Ask for less state, not more.
How it keeps happening, every time:
Forget ideology. Follow the incentives.
A politician’s horizon is the next election. Two years, four years, six at most. His reward comes from promising: free tuition, cancelled debt, guaranteed housing, a green transition paid for by someone else. The bill arrives in ten, twenty, thirty years. By then he’s retired, writing his memoir, giving paid speeches. He collects the applause today. You pay the invoice tomorrow. Any system where the person who makes the promise never pays for breaking it will produce endless broken promises. That isn’t a moral failure. It’s a mathematical certainty.
A bureaucrat is rewarded for the size of his budget and his team, not for solving the problem. If he solves it, his department shrinks. If it gets worse, he asks for more money, and he usually gets it. Failure is literally funded. …
When capital is allocated by politics instead of markets, the most profitable skill is no longer building. It’s lobbying. Getting close to the money. Writing the rule that crushes your competitor. Corruption stops being a bug and becomes the business model. …
The incentives of the left, which is now primarily the bureaucratic-welfare class:
Meanwhile, Europe’s fashionable economists offer the opposite diagnosis. Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman tell us the problem is that the state doesn’t take enough: more wealth taxes, more redistribution, more state. France has been running that experiment for fifty years. The result is one of the highest tax burdens in the developed world, record debt, and capital and talent leaving the country every year.
The same old ending:
History shows how this movie ends. Debt piles up until it can no longer be repaid. Currencies get debased. Then comes the reset, and it is rarely peaceful. Rome debased its coins for generations before it collapsed. Weimar’s hyperinflation came just before the darkest chapter of the 20th century. Empires that can’t stop spending don’t reform gently. They break.
We are approaching the end of that cycle. America now spends more on interest on its debt than on its military.
The US is one of the least affected. Check out China:
China is in a debt black hole from which there is no escape.
A country that borrows heavily from the future and cannot possibly pay it back, or keep its citizens at the standard of living afforded by the credit card, sometimes resort to war — for example Nazi Germany 1939.
hat-tip David Archibald