Convergence of Catastrophes, page 14
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Cutting our military budgets compromises employment and high technology. Although the threats against Europe have not lessened at all since the end of the ‘Cold War’ — rather the opposite — Europeans are cutting their military budgets (the United States is doing the opposite). These budgets are being strangled by the pressure of social and medical expenses, which are caused by immigration and the ageing of the population. Cutting defence expenditures is not only a strategic mistake; it is a major economic mistake, because more than anything else military technology is the source of breakthroughs in science and jobs.
The new, multinational European group for aeronautics and defence, EADS (formed by an alliance of Matra, Alena Marconi Systems, British Aerospace, Deutsche Aerospace, Aérospatiale, Finmeccanica and Belgian, Spanish and Dutch companies), has fired 1,500 employees in 2001 (highly trained engineers who will leave for North America), because European defence markets are stagnating or shrinking. Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, etc., are reducing their military purchases. In 2000, 1,500 regular troops have already left the defence division. Thomas Enders, the director of this division, stated in the Financial Times (15 December 2000), ‘Military budgets are not a waste of money, but an irreplaceable locomotive for civilian technological breakthroughs and good jobs.’ Let us recall that the Internet, cell phones, telecommunication satellites, civil aeronautics, and so on, are direct spin-offs of military technology.
The social consequences of cutting military budgets are disastrous. For example, the DCN (Direction des constructions navales) is firing workers in the dockyards of Toulon and Cherbourg. This is suicidal. ‘Jobs for youth’, unskilled youth, are replacing highly skilled technological and military jobs.
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Is the reform of retirement benefits just dust thrown in our eyes? The Raffarin government[152] boasts that it has courageously tackled the problem of retirements and has solved the question of financing them, while shaking up Leftist corporatism. This is not the opinion of Marie-Laure Dufrêche, general delegate of the ‘Sauvegarde Retraits’ association, as she says in the journal, Renaissance des hommes et des idées (December 2003). She concedes that the Fillon law[153] (21 August 2003) has made three positive, if timid, improvements: making the indexing of pensions uniform between private and public entities; equalising the extent of assessments (only from 2008); and flexibility in the administration of pensions for surviving spouses. These are marginal measures, however, that do not touch the essential.
First of all, out of fear of strikes by the civil servants’ unions, this ‘reform’ does not attack the special, privileged administration of civil servants, especially of the French national rail system (SNCF), which is extremely costly, since it employs 180,000 active agents for 350,000 retired ones, who are essentially remunerated by taxpayers. The average retirement age of conductors is 50; office agents retire at 55. Only in France . . . Finally, SNCF maintains the same absurd fashion of calculating pensions for retired agents: ‘The base salary that serves to determine the increase of the pension remains based on the last six months for public employees, while it is a function of the 25 best years for private workers.’ Last of all, this small-scale reform is not financed or financeable: ‘The deficit foreseen in 2020 rises to 43 billion euros. Thanks to the new measures, it could be held to 18 billion. This last estimate rests on a hypothesis of economic growth — a very optimistic one — of 2.5 per cent a year and an equally hypothetical unemployment rate of 6 per cent . . . The time is not far off when the 3.5 million public retirements will cost taxpayers more than the 8.5 million private retirements.’
It is necessary to remember that the majority of the political class and the deputies, of both Right and Left, are composed of ‘unattached’ bureaucrats. It is evident that the next ‘reform’ of social security will be just as timorous and ineffective and the famous ‘gap’ between public and private will continue to grow. The whole affair is an optical illusion, dust in our eyes. If we put off the solution of the problem, we will go straight to the wall. Only a shock, a real one, in every area, will be able to provoke real reforms.
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France is a corporatist country, a stalled society[154] incapable of the slightest reform and any perception of the future. It is the opposite of Germany, which is willing to take the serious problem of retirement by the horns. The legal age of retirement in Germany is 65 for men and 60 for women. Gerhard Schröder wants to raise it to 67 in 2011, despite the opposition within his party,[155] the SPD.[156] Katrin Goering-Eckhardt, president of the parliamentary group of the Greens, believes ‘one can take seriously a reduction of the level of retirement payments’ of well-off retirees. In France, such measures and discussions are unthinkable . . . Despite these drastic and courageous measures, however, the finance minister, Hans Eichel, has just recognised, ‘the proportion of retirement expenses has moved in the past three decades from 14 per cent to 29 per cent of the budget. If this continues without slowing down, the proportion will be 80 per cent in 2050. This cannot go on’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung and Leipziger Volkszeitung, 30 May 2003). In other words, it would mean the collapse of the entire economy.
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What are the real causes for the overwhelming deficit of health insurance? The report of the Court of Accounts on 18 September 2003 (which no one will ever take account of, we must admit) explains this gap of 29 billion euros — a 90 billion francs deficit accumulated from 1997 to 2003 — by the incompetence and incoherence of every government that allows expenses to grow.
This uncontrolled inflation is not at all the consequences of a ‘perfect storm’ or a lack of income, nor even of a better managing of medical resources (just the opposite!), but of continual laxity and wastefulness of governments from Jospin to Raffarin. The Court enumerates the absurdities of the administration of incompetents who, by demagogy and unwillingness to change because of cold feet, are drawing us inexorably ever closer to bankruptcy: 1) an uncontrolled rise in medical prescriptions, ignoring and twisting past agreements; 2) lax increase of daily indemnities for sick leave; 3) application of the 35-hour workweek in hospitals (with a cost of 3.4 billion euros annually); 4) Raffarin’s raising honoraria for general practitioners (690 million euros); 5) lack of prescription ‘generic medicines’; 6) an increase of 900,000 patients requiring ‘long-term care’ in 2001, reimbursed at 100 per cent, plus an increase in the costs for house calls; 7) continual ignoring of ‘price controls’ and agreements signed by doctors, who refuse the ‘evaluation of practices’ — 180 out of 130,000 have signed on to it; 8) inability of Martine Aubry and Élisabeth Guigou,[157] and then of Jean-François Mattei to suppress reimbursements for medicines that do not work (insufficient for ‘medical service rendered’) and therapeutic activities ‘for comfort’; and 9) refusing to abolish privileged care in numerous categories for bureaucrats, which are perfectly unjustified.
We now know that the weak Raffarin government will no more solve the problem of health insurance and the reform of Social Security than it has that of retirement. The objective of the calamitous Mattei[158] was not at all to take the bull by the horns (as other European countries are doing) and end the deficit, but simply to try to bring the deficit of 2004 (17 billion to take care of health insurance) back to the level of 2003 (12 billion). Lamentable . . . Did I forget to say that all these cumulative deficits are nothing but loans, and so debts contracted, that taxpayers will pay one day, plus interest?
The problem is no longer to know if the system is going to collapse, but when. This will not be a pretty sight to see, with the imminent ageing of the population.
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What is the situation of the French debt? It is flabbergasting and every French government for thirty years has let it grow, abandoning any discipline in public finances. Remember that the European Social Forum,[159] consisting of Trotskyite globalists, was in part financed by the Prime Minister’s office . . . The national debt (borrowed to fill the budgetary deficit) has grown since the 1980s from 20 per cent of the GDP to more than 60 per cent and will reach 70 per cent in 2005.[160] The French state’s expenditures rose in 2003 to 280 billion euros with only 220 billion euros of income. No household or business can support expenses higher than its income by 27 per cent. This indebtedness is among the worst in the developed world and contributes to our country’s slow descent to Third World status.
For each active worker, the debt is 38,000 euros. To reimburse this debt and its interest, each French household pays 2,000 euros a year — and the sum grows every year. Without this debt, there would be supplementary revenues that could be reinjected into the economy. Servicing the debt has assumed the number two position in the budget after the ‘Mammoth’, national education. The Court of Accounts knows it, it storms against it, but without legal power it protests in vain.
In addition, we must wonder if the enormous cost of immigration is not a significant factor in this impending bankruptcy. And then let us not forget that the state’s financial bankruptcy has often been the factor that unleashed revolutions.
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France cannot deal with work. It is the industrial country where people work the least, what with a 35-hour workweek, holidays, ‘bridges’,[161] long paid vacations and, of course, systematic strikes of public workers or excessive public enterprises. It is the country where there has been the most theorising about the right to be lazy,[162] where old-fashioned Marxists demand in their platforms a ‘citizenship income’, which is equivalent to an indexed minimum wage (salaire minimum interprofessionel de croissance, or SMIC) for every person who has chosen not to work. (Such a measure, in addition to increasing irresponsibility, would have the disadvantage of reinforcing immigration’s suction pump.) It is the country where people retire at the earliest age and still there are calls to lower the retirement age even further, despite the ageing population. It is the country where intellectuals out of touch with reality explain that work is a form of alienation and the future will be a society of leisure.
Compared with its neighbours, France is moving in slow motion. Vacations are the centre of every conversation. Productivity per capita is 40 per cent higher in the United States than in Europe, which is the principal cause of Europe’s stagnation in terms of power and wealth.
Then — the opposite of the common opinion — this refusing to work, this laziness, to call it by its name, leads like all sloth to clinical depression. France is one of the European countries with the highest youth suicide rate and the greatest use of tranquillisers. In fact, degrading the value of work and despising productivity strips people, especially those of modest means, of reasons to feel useful and enjoy self-respect, and leads them to depression. Reducing the quantity of work aggravates social friction and generalises ennui. In addition to the enormous social problems they provoke (see the hospital sector), the disastrous 35-hour workweek further upsets the balance between work and leisure and causes the population to lose, little by little, their taste for activity and hard work and lures them to the temptation of loafing.
What about leisure activities? For most people, these activities are rarely active and creative. The middle classes, who are increasingly impoverished, cannot allow themselves to take advantage of excessive leisure travel. For them, leisure is not an occasion to learn or create. They experience leisure as ‘dead time’, which they mostly spend staring at the television screen or playing video games, an occasion to realise one’s social uselessness. Only work, even humble work, allows them to occupy their minds. ‘Production is the basis of morale‘, L. Ron Hubbard[163] wrote in The Way to Happiness.[164] In other words, work, not leisure, creates quality of life.
Silly intellectuals are always criticising ‘work as a value’. They want us to believe that gains in productivity, which they expect to increase to infinity, are going to make up for the shrinking of time spent working. The argument is absurd. France is working less and less compared to Great Britain and the United States, where the gains in productivity are the same. Well, when you work less with the same productivity (in the best case), you grow poorer compared with everybody else. The stupid slogan, ‘work less to work better’ is irrelevant, since the French are not encouraged to work better than their competition. I remember reading in the Financial Times when we voted on the 35-hour workweek, ‘The French are geniuses: they work less in order to earn more.’ Intellectuals always imagine that workers experience work as degrading and disagreeable, which is totally mistaken. It never occurs to them for a second that nurses, roofers, vintners, engineers, and so on, could find their work fulfilling and that this is noble. Intellectuals share the old mentality, the product of the decadent urban nobility and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, according to which ‘work dirties your hands’.
It is not difficult to understand that, in a world of generalised competition, as soon as one country shortens its workweek, it grows poor and becomes proletarian, especially when this minimum wage is accompanied by (and at the same time causes) growing tax burdens and payroll withholding. The situation is aggravated by the masses of people on public relief and mouths to feed with no skills that are pouring out of the Third World.
The result is that French businesses are the ones in Europe that invest most heavily abroad. This is not a victory, but a defeat. They are moving away from their local communities; they are fleeing France (just as foreign investors do), where the cost of labour grows (because of the cost of entitlements) in proportion to the shrinking of its productivity. At the same time, business executives and young college graduates are leaving France en masse — the elites, those who want to work and love to work — replaced by unskilled immigrants. France’s outstanding trump card, the legendary quality of its workforce, is rapidly degrading.
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There is also a significant correlation between the unemployment rate and the reduced workweek. This is quite logical: the work of one group creates jobs for others. The less a country — or a business — works, the less it ‘sends orders’ to neighbouring suppliers. If the French worked a 45-hour workweek, like the Americans, instead of 35 hours a week, their businesses would create that many more jobs in France itself. Work creates work. By augmenting the objective cost of work in France, the reduced workweek obliges businesses that take orders, both from French and foreign, to turn away from French suppliers. Recently, a large publishing house drove a French printer into bankruptcy when the printer raised its prices because of the 35-hour workweek. The publisher chose a Spanish printer. Hospitals, similarly, have been obliged either to hire supplementary personnel — thereby increasing costs and leading to two-tier medicine where the wealthy receive better care — or to cut back on the quality of healthcare.
Since the French mind is always marked by the old faith in ‘the providential character of wealth’ (money comes, miraculously, from the state), it is hard for it to understand that money has only one source: work and the production that ensues. The only exception involves some Arab states that live off oil revenues without the need to work themselves. The economic culture in France, however, is very low and always marked by ideological dogmatism. The French want both a welfare state and a society with a short workweek. But where does the manna of this state come from, in socialist reality? From income taxes and the value added tax (VAT). Where do they come from? From the incomes of taxpayers and consumers. How do they get their incomes? From the fruit of their labour sold on the market.
The dominant French intelligentsia has never understood that pragmatism is worth more than idealism; that quantity is not the enemy of quality, but its condition; that the more you work, the better you work; that prosperity and happiness are not possible without a vocation, which is both difficult and yet attractive. In France we look upon work as a kind of serfdom or slavery.
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A society with a short workweek, the paradise of the theoreticians of the ‘right to be lazy’, who are as ignorant as babies of economics, is possible only in the framework of a strictly autarchic system, which maintains no trade with an outside world much more productive than itself. This system can be indifferently Communist or mercantile, but its level of consumption, wealth, health care, etc., will necessarily be low. In short, it will be a neo-primitive economy. Why not? This is the dream of ‘radical environmentalism’.
The problem with intellectuals (like Alain Lipietz) who extol the no-work model and ‘radical environmentalists’ who demand an economy with little energy consumption is that they are absolutely unprepared to take personal responsibility for the consequences of the radical lowering of their ‘standard of living’, an expression execrated by the ‘anti-quantitative’ theoreticians, who, however, all turn out to be bourgeois super-consumers.
The second possible facet of an economy with little work is that of the Gulf States, the states living off their incomes, of whom we just spoke. This income could dry up any day. The third model is the late Roman Empire, whose citizens lived in sloth, maintained by a bureaucratic welfare state that took booty from conquered provinces. We know how that model ended.
