Maybe the French Aren't So Bad After All

I like poking fun at French politicians for being hopeless statists, and I always assumed that French voters shared their collectivist sympathies. But according to new polling data reported by the Financial Times, there may be a Tea Party revolt brewing in France. Among major European nations, the French are most in favor of smaller government. Sacre Bleu!

European governments have solid public support, at least for now, for the spending cuts they are making in an effort to boost economic recovery, according to the latest Financial Times/Harris opinion poll. ...The poll’s results point to a fiscal conservatism among the European public that contrasts with the eagerness with which most governments ran up high deficits to protect jobs and living standards as the crisis unfolded. ...Asked if public spending cuts were necessary to help long-term economic recovery, 84 per cent of French people, 71 per cent of Spaniards, 69 per cent of Britons, 67 per cent of Germans and 61 per cent of Italians answered Yes. ...Asked if they preferred public spending cuts or tax rises as a way to reduce budget deficits and national debts, strong majorities in the five EU countries as well as the US were in favour of spending cuts. Similarly conservative views on public expenditure emerged when people were asked if EU governments were right to engage in large-scale deficit-spending after the 2008 crisis. In all five EU countries, a majority – ranging from 68 per cent in France and Italy to 54 per cent in the UK – said the governments were wrong to have done so.

Those Crazy French

To preserve domestic tranquility, men should always shout "NO" when their wives ask "Does this make me look fat?" Well, Frenchmen now also have a legal reason to give that answer. In a nation where everything seemingly requires a role for government, there is a new law with penalties of "...up to three years in prison and a €75,000 fine" for men who insult their spouses. The law does apply both ways, so men who are called "lazy fat slobs" for watching TV instead of taking out the garbage also can run to the government for psychological protection. Allow me to stipulate that there is such a thing as "psychological violence" and there doubtlessly are cases of genuine non-physical abuse, but those presumably are ground for divorce, not a matter for law enforcement. In any event, here's a blurb from the UK-based Telegraph:

Couples who insult each other over their physical appearance or make false accusations about infidelity face jail, under a new French law making "psychological violence" a criminal offence. ...French magistrates have slammed the new legislation as "inapplicable", as they argue the definition of what constitutes an insult is too vague and verbal abuse too hard to prove. ...men now also have the right to report their wives verbal abuse in a domestic row. It will apply to both married couples and cohabiting partners. ...Miss Morano said witnesses could be called on to testify in such cases and doctors' certificates charting a patient's descent into nervous depression as a result of such insults could be used as evidence. ...The courts also stood to be "clogged" by couples using the law to get the upper hand in acrimonious divorces, she added. Women who complain that their husband insulted them can now have a judge ban him from approaching his wife or their children on a simple declaration, she warned.

Europe's Reforms, I Fear, Will Be Too Little and Too Late, Part I

Governments that tax work and subsidize sloth are committing a form of slow-motion suicide, and the Greek fiscal crisis is the canary in the coal mine of this phenomenon. Interestingly, some European governments are trying to halt the downward slide, though I suspect that most of them will fail to take the necessary steps. But it's nonetheless good news that this is getting coverage since it is equally important that the United States learn the right lessons so we can reverse the reckless big-government policies of the Bush-Obama years. Here's an excerpt from a thorough AP story:

...the welfare state — cherished by many Europeans as an alternative to what they see as dog-eat-dog American capitalism — is coming under its most serious threat in decades: Europe's sovereign debt crisis. Deep budget cuts are under way across Europe. Although the first round is focused mostly on government payrolls — the least politically explosive target — welfare benefits are looking increasingly vulnerable. "The current welfare state is unaffordable," said Uri Dadush, director of the Carnegie Endowment's International Economics Program. ..."We have to adjust our social security systems in a way that they motivate people to accept regular work and do not give counterproductive incentives," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told news weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on Saturday. ...Demographers and economists began warning decades ago that social welfare was doomed by the aging of Europe's baby boomers. Some governments had been trimming and reforming, but now almost all are scrambling to close deficits in order to prevent a wider collapse of confidence in the euro. The [British] government has promised to raise the age at which citizens receive a state pension — up from 60 to 65 for women, and from 65 to 66 for men. It also plans to toughen the welfare regime, requiring the unemployed to try to find jobs in order to collect benefits. ...Ministers are reviewing the long-term affordability of the country's generous public sector pensions. ...France's conservative government is focusing on raising the retirement age. Many workers can now retire at 60 with 50 percent of their average salary. ...Unions in France are organizing a national day of protest marches and strikes on Thursday to demand protection of wages and the retirement age. [Spain] has proposed hiking the retirement age for men from 65 to 67. ...After sharp cutbacks imposed as the condition of an international bailout this month, Greeks must now contribute to pension funds for 40 instead of 37 years before retiring, and the age of early retirement is set to 60 at the earliest. Civil servants with monthly salaries of above 3,000 euros ($3,750) will lose two extra months of salary — one paid at Christmas, the other split between Easter and summer vacation.

Regardless of the Problem, the European Political Elite Thinks More Centralization and Bigger Government Is always the Answer

Greece is in trouble for a combination of reasons. Government spending is far too excessive, diverting resources from more efficient uses. The bureaucracy is too large and paid too much, resulting in a misallocation of labor. And tax rates are too high, further hindering the productive sector of the economy. Europe's political class wants to bail out Greece's profligate government. The official reason for a bailout, to protect the euro currency, makes no sense. After all, if Illinois or California default, that would not affect the strength (or lack thereof) of the dollar.

To understand what is really happening in Europe, it is always wise to look at what politicians are doing and ignore what they are saying. Political union is the religion of Europe's political class, and they relentlessly use any excuse to centralize power in Brussels and strip away national sovereignty. Greece's fiscal crisis is simply the latest excuse to move the goalposts. The Daily Telegraph reports that Germany and France are now conspiring to create an "economic government" for the European Union. Supposedly this entity would only have supervisory powers, but it is a virtual certainty that a European-wide tax will be the next step for the euro-centralizers.

Germany and France have [proposed] controversial plans to create an "economic government of the European Union" to police financial policy across the continent. They have put Herman Van Rompuy, the EU President, in charge of a special task force to examine "all options possible" to prevent another crisis like the one caused by the Greek meltdown. ...The options he will consider include the creation of an "economic government" by the by the end of the year. "We commit to promote a strong co-ordination of economic policies in Europe," said a draft text expected to be agreed by EU leaders last night. "We consider that the European Council should become the economic government of the EU and we propose to increase its role in economic surveillance and the definition of the EU's growth strategy." ...Mr Van Rompuy, the former Prime Minister of Belgium, is an enthusiastic supporter of "la gouvernement économique" and last month upset many national capitals by trying impose "top down" economic targets. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has called for the Lisbon Treaty to be amended in order to prevent any repetition of the current Greek crisis, which has threatened to tear apart the euro.

Stories from the French Resistance

Statists often claim that high taxes have no impact on behavior. Too bad Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi weren't with me today. I needed to get a taxi from the Nice Airport to the railway station. I asked the cabbie whether he took credit cards and he visibly recoiled and said I needed cash.

During the drive, I asked him why he doesn't take credit cards. He said none of the taxi drivers take credit cards. He said something to the effect that they would have to charge 10 euro more to make up for the taxes. It didn't require much reading between the lines to understand that my taxi fare was not going to be reported to the greedy French tax authorities.

Viva le resistance! (I'm probably spelling that wrong and/or using bad grammar, and/or missing some accents, but it's the spirit that counts)

Call the Language Police! Sometimes the French Oppose Harmonization

The French government is relentlessly awful in its support for tax harmonization, regulatory harmonization, and other policies to drag other nations into the cesspool of statism. But France's desire for a one-size-fits-all approach miraculously vanishes when it comes to language. Even though English is now the world's language, especially for commerce, the French are resorting to coercion and protectionism to protect against - gasp! - English words. I greatly enjoyed this WSJ column about France's fight against modernity:

A French group entitled Avenir de la Langue Française (Future of the French Language) has claimed that the invasion of English words poses a greater "threat" to France's national identity than the imposition of German under the Nazis. Writing recently in Le Monde and l'Humanite, the group, supported by eight other patriotic organizations, has called on the Sarkozy government to turn back the English flood. "There are more English words on the walls of Paris," they state, "than German words under the Occupation." ...English has became the dominant language of the Internet, air traffic control, computers, international business and by 2030 more Chinese people will be able to speak it than there are Americans. Already by 2001, English was being spoken by more than one in three of the 350 million citizens of the European Union, whereas fewer than one in 10 spoke French outside France itself. Even in those areas where French influence has been strong —Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chad, and elsewhere—English has encroached very successfully. English is the official language used by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the only working language of the European Free Trade Association, the Baltic Marine Biologists Association, the Asian Amateur Athletics Association, the African Hockey Federation, while it is the second language of bodies as diverse as the Andean Commission of Jurists and the Arab Air Carriers Organization. ...France's traditional response to this linguistic "Anglobalization" has been to attempt a form of legal protectionism against the steamroller tongue of "les rosbifs" and "les Anglo-Saxons". In 1994 the French Assemblée Nationale passed the Loi Toubon, which was signed into law by President François Mitterand. Named after Jacques Toubon, the culture minister, it stipulated that "French shall be the language of instruction, work, trade and exchanges and of the public services. "The use of French shall be mandatory for the designation, offer, presentation, instructions for use, and description of the scope and conditions of a warranty of goods, products and services as well as bills and receipts. The same provisions apply to any written, spoken, radio and television advertisement" and so on for another 21 highly prescriptive clauses. The law has been used against American and British companies, such as Disney and the Body Shop on the Champs Elysées that had labels in English. ...In two centuries, French may have to be protected as a linguistic curio, like Britain does with Cornish or Manx. Until then, the French must learn to be bilingual, or risk being left behind in the global market-place, gasping outraged complaints in a tongue fewer and fewer people understand.

Dog Bites Man: French Push Bad Tax Policy

Since I said something semi-nice about the French a couple of days ago, let me now revert to form and bash French politicians for their reflexive desire to tax and tax and tax again. The first example is from Tax-news.com, which reports that the French government wants to tax Google and other online companies in order to subsidize politically-approved news outlets:

A report presented recently to the French Culture Ministry has proposed a series of measures designed to improve the legitimate supply of cultural services provided over the Internet and their financing, including most notably the introduction of a new tax to be levied on the online advertising revenue derived by Internet giants such as Google. ...In order to finance the proposals, estimated at around EUR50m in 2010, and between EUR35m and EUR40m a year in 2011 and 2012, the report advocates the introduction of a levy imposed on online advertising revenue. Dubbed the “Google tax” by one of the main authors of the report, Jacques Toubon, himself a former French Culture Minister, the levy is designed to support creative industries and online press sites. A threshold level for the tax would ensure that the levy only affects large companies such as Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Facebook.

If the French politicians limited to themselves to raping French citizens, that would be reprehensible, but not exactly a reason for the rest of the world to be upset. Unfortunately, the French government has a misery-loves-company attitude and is always trying to export bad policy to other nations. France, for instance, is a leading supporter of the OECD's anti-tax competition crusade (not surprisingly, the OECD is based in Paris even though the US pays one-fourth of the bureaucracy's bloated budget). Another example is France's campaign to impose an EU-wide carbon tax, which combines the worst aspects of big government, protectionism, and enviro-radicalism. The EU Observer reports:

France intends to push for a tax on carbon emissions across the European Union, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Wednesday (6 December), a week after his country's top court struck down an attempt to introduce just such a tax domestically. Mr Sarkozy also wants to see carbon "tariffs" slapped on products entering the EU from countries with weaker environmental legislation. ...Any carbon tariff move is likely to meet with stiff resistance from other EU member states, particularly the more free-trade oriented nations, who would view such a levy as a form of protectionism. When an EU carbon tax imposed at the borders of the bloc was first mooted at a meeting of European environment ministers last July, the idea was given a frosty reception, particularly by Germany. ...In response, the French government is to present a re-edited version of the bill on 20 January, taking into consideration the court's objections. On Tuesday, French finance minister Christine Lagarde said that the new law would would involve a progressive tax, with different brackets similar to income taxation.

Is France the Best Place in the World to Live?

A new survey from International Living says that France has the highest quality of life, followed by Australia and Switzerland. The United States, meanwhile, is in seventh place, behind nations such as Germany, New Zealand, and Luxembourg:

To produce this annual Index we consider nine categories: Cost of Living, Culture and Leisure, Economy, Environment, Freedom, Health, Infrastructure, Safety and Risk, and Climate. This involves a lot of number crunching from "official" sources, including government websites, the World Health Organization, and The Economist, to name but a few. We also take into account what our editors from all over the world have to say about our findings.

1. FRANCE
2. AUSTRALIA
3. SWITZERLAND
4. GERMANY
5. NEW ZEALAND
6. LUXEMBOURG
7. UNITED STATES
8. BELGIUM
9. CANADA
10. ITALY

While I enjoy hammering French socialists, this does not mean I disagree with the list. International Living's Index basically measures good places to live for people who already have money. France is a very nice country to visit, and would be a very nice place for a rich person to live depending on one's preferences for food, weather, and culture. Personally, I'd go for someplace warm and sunny, such as the Cayman Islands (which only ranks 54th out of 194 options). There are plenty of interesting details in the comprehensive table, including Liechtenstein being the only place to get a perfect score in the economy category. Somalia was the worst overall country. The biggest surprise, at least to me, is that Singapore was ranked 70th. Seems rather low since a number of rich people are choosing to become Singapore residents.

A VAT Would Finance the Road to Serfdom

This blog has been warning about the danger of a value-added tax. We've cited the salivating comments of Speaker Pelosi. We've noted the favorable comments by Obama insiders like the former Co-Chairman of his transition team. We know the battle is coming. Now we need to fight. This newly-released video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity provides the data showing that this is a do-or-die fight. If we lose, there is no hope of stopping statism. Blocking a VAT is not a sufficient condition to protect America from becoming a French-style welfare state, but it is a necessary condition.

France Wants to Move the Goal Posts to Hide Dismal Economic Performance

A column in the Wall Street Journal mocks President Sarkozy for suggesting that gross domestic product, which is how economic growth is measured, be changed to include subjective variables such as happiness. This is a transparent attempt to paper over France's sluggish economic performance. Happiness is important, of course, but it comes about by allowing people to make voluntary choices in a free society, not by creating involuntary leisure with stifling tax rates and welfare dependency:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently said he wanted the nations of the world to stop using GDP, or gross domestic product, as the main measure of their economic performance. He wants them instead to work up another metric that takes into account not only economic production but such things as environmental quality and even time not spent in traffic—a sort of gross national satisfaction index. France has excellent reason to suppress GDP statistics. Since 1982, among developed nations, France has been a clear laggard in GDP growth. In the quarter century following 1982, France's GDP growth rate was a mere 2.1% per year in comparison to the U.S.'s 3.3%. Thus the U.S. grew at more than a 50% premium to France per year during that span. When the quarter century elapsed, Americans were one-third richer than the French. ...countries of "old Europe" such as France and Italy that were content to stand pat with an overregulated private sector and tax rates well above 50% were left in the dust. In 2003, as the Iraq war got going, France complained that the U.S. was the world's "hyperpower." Yet France itself was partly responsible for this fate. ...If Mr. Sarkozy's statisticians ever come up with their new economic index, they should be sure it includes leisure time—because that is one thing the French economy excels at producing. In 2004, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Edward Prescott asked, in the title of a journal article, "Why Do Americans Work So Much More Than Europeans?" The answer, he found, was tax rates. Tax rates had fallen so much in the U.S. by that year that the American workforce couldn't wait to get on the job—or start a business—because you got to keep so much of what you earned. In contrast, high and progressive French taxes left over from the 1970s lured people away from work, especially as they started doing well. So people came to take seven-hour days and six-week vacations, as well as not show any particular interest in striking out on their own in a work-intensive small business. The oldest and most pathetic trick in the book when you lose a contest is to try to move the goal posts. GDP statistics of the past quarter century have shamed France but flattered the U.S., Britain and East Asia. Mr. Sarkozy's gambit to paper over this real difference will be lucky to find any takers.

An Astounding 52 Percent of French Citizens Interested in Fleeing to Capitalist America

The French love to complain about the unfettered capitalism (if only that was true) and social Darwinism of America's "Anglo-Saxon" system. Yet a Reader's Digest poll found that more than one-half of the French people would be interested in moving to America if they had the opportunity.

How Dare the French Complain About Polanski's Detention

The French are upset that Roman Polanski, the fugitive child rapist, has been detained by Swiss authorities at the request of the U.S. government. The Justice Department wants Polanski extradited because he fled America for France to avoid jail time. Other people have properly condemned the French government for wanting to defend this sleazeball, who anally raped a 13-year old girl, but I have a different complaint. French politicians are the leading agitators for the OECD campaign against so-called tax havens. According to Sarkozy and company, low-tax jurisdictions should be obliged to enforce the punitive tax laws of OECD member nations. Yet France refused to send Polanski back to America because it did not feel any need to help enforce America's laws against molesting and raping children. I'm glad Polanski was dumb enough to travel to Switzerland. I'm glad the Swiss authorities had the moral decency to detain Polanski. And I'm overjoyed the French are getting a taste of the medicine their trying to impose on others.

P.S. The last sentence is a horribly flawed comparison on my part. It is a good thing when nations cooperate to investigate and prosecute criminals who violate the rules of all civilized societies. It is not a good thing, however, for high-tax nations to try to impose their tax laws on economic activity that takes place in low-tax jurisdictions. In other words, France is trying to coerce international cooperation where it is not appropriate, but is fighting international cooperation to protect child rape. Amazing.

P.P.S. The French also give protection to murderers who escape America. The French government position (shared by all European Union nations!) is that it will not extradite murderers to the United States if they might face the death penalty.