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| More musings on the French rioting | | Date Created: Nov 27, 2005, 11:40 AM |
 It's been fascinating to watch the reaction of the French and the leftist sympathizing media and pundits in the US try to come to grips with the rioting and upheaval in France. The answer is right in front of their faces but they can't see it -- kind of like not being able to see liberal bias in mainstream US media. Charles seems to have part of it here, but it's spelled out in Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left of It and he specifically predicted this type of reaction in an essay called, "Barbarians At The Gates of Paris" from fall of '02. Another book that looks like it has the answer but I haven't read yet, is Robert Conquest's, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History.
What was the real problem with New Orleans and Katrina? Why can't we spend our way out of these problems? I thought the French had it so nice with 35 hour work weeks, six weeks vacation, and complete disability and retirement coverage?
The answer in a word (as well as why the US hasn't gone the same route... yet) is dependency. If you are forced by reality to depend on yourself and your immediate family or community, it won't be perfect and some will fail, but with at least some opportunities provided by private property rights, contract rights, equal enforcement of just laws, and free markets, a society of people can improve over time. If you depend on the government and the forced handouts (taxation) of others along with an entitlement mentality, lack of personal responsibility, and an endless belief that more money or rights will solve problems, then you will end up rioting and your society will fail. A corollary to this is that you can't accept any and all comers into the society and provide the same welfare benefits as the previous closed (or controlled immigration) society. This will fail too. Immigrants need to make it on their own within the existing society and it's opportunities. The US used to be like this...
You don't have to have an address in Clichy sous Bois to have difficulty getting a job in France's welfare state today. The problem isn't "poverty" or "discrimination" or "racism" or "capitalism".
So I wonder what changed in the Parisian suburbs? French bureaucracy? Can
be very humiliating at times, and to think the French pay enormous taxes to
keep those petits fonctionnaires in beignets.
You've named two of the consequences of the welfare state that fosters dependency -- bureaucracy and enormous taxes. There's more to it than that. It's fundamentally the dependence on the government to provide and the idea that money extracted from those who produce can solve all problems. We're seeing the fundamental failure of the welfare/socialism society just as we've already seen the failure of communism/extreme socialism. And IMHO, in spite of Republican/conservative rhetoric to the contrary, we're going down the same road in the US but haven't advanced as far.
We've outspent the Soviet Union but the bill will come due as we're starting to see in Europe.
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