The belief that government, of itself, can make life better is the great heresy that now threatens the very future of France. From the guillotine, which removed peoples’ heads, to the employment law, TEPA, which removed income tax on overtime, government interventions have seldom rewarded the intended beneficaries. Beheading people did not make the unbeheaded any happier, apart from the executioner, paid per severed skull, and a few psychopaths on the Committee of Public Safety. Cutting income tax on overtime became an inducement for inefficiency during regular working hours, leading to more overtime and less tax revenue.
TEPA was the brainchild of an intellectual, Myriam El Khomri, a graduate of the Montesquieu University of Bordeaux. Montesquieu once observed that useless laws weaken valuable laws. Quite so. It is surely a kin of Kromri’s law that makes it illegal in France to eat lunch at your desk, truly encapsulating the madness of modern France. That madness was fully on display on September 18 with the national strike against austerity measures and for increased public expenditure, (yes, really).
I spent last week amongst the ordinary people of Rue Daguerre, in the Montparnasse district of Paris. They stayed working while public servants went on strike in accordance with the unions’ brainless adherence to cargo-cult economics. This was the sect that South Sea Islanders created after they had looked up and then saw, lo, American aircraft landing and then unloading goods, freely, and for nothing!
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