L’échéance (The Deadline)

François de Closets 2012 – Photo: Dunkerque 2016 –

Rigor or economic stimulus? In this fall of 2009, it is up to the Greek people to choose.

70 years later, the game is the same, but the ground has changed: from the military, we went to the economy. Since 2007, the world is facing the worst crisis of the last 50 years, perhaps of the entire industrial age. But the French, apart from the extra one million unemployed, have poorly felt the effects. The standard of living has been maintained, the welfare state still provides benefits, no social rights have been questioned.

What does social fraud represent? As much as tax fraud is almost known, ~ € 50 billion, and fought without a state of mind, as social fraud is ignored and fantasized. For the liberal right (a kind of republican party in France) it is huge. For the socialist left, it can only be marginal. In 2011, a parliamentary mission assesses moonlighting (illegal work) in the order of € 15 billion.

In this melting pot of tax cuts … (€ 150 billion) … everyone imagines excluded from these privileges that would benefit others … we all benefit in one way or another, and often without knowing it.

1% of the French population get an average of € 84,500 / year. 0.01% (5,800 households) have 1,200,000 € / year. On the total income, shared by the French, the share taken by the 90% who are neither the poorest nor the richest has experienced a quasi stagnation (2004-2007 INSEE 2010).

In 2003, while the Germans launch the battle for competitiveness (translate more precariousness, lower wages/incomes), the French population starts at 35h weekly work, hire government employees, increase the minimum wage and support consumption through the public deficit … We catch up when our labor was cheaper, now the Germans are giving us the pawn. In 1 decade, we have accumulated a deficit of 100 billion in bilateral trade. Today our challenge is not China, but Germany (deficits of 20 and 16 billion euros respectively).

Social dialogue plays a minor role, between employers who do not want to concede anything, for fear of being unable to take over, and unions that do not want to accept anything, for fear of being fooled. Faced with the exacerbated competition of globalization, such rigidities become deadly.

Governments have lost the right of unpopularity, they can only increase and never reduce, add without removing.

Is it any wonder that a foolish people feels the temptation of rupture, total rejection? Down with Europe, down with the euro, down with the big ones, close our borders, let’s go back to yesterday’s France and ask the state for all-risk insurance against the future. The French have every reason to be indignant, unfortunately they prove to be more reactionary than reactive, more anxious to preserve than to rebuild.

All the needs of men are as such legitimate … the multiple aspirations, always renewed, become rights: the right to safety, to work, to leisure, to education, to health, to children, etc. … With the welfare state, “the right of” becomes “the right to”. All industrial societies have, more or less, locked themselves into this trap: to create hopes which they are incapable of satisfying.

Dockers ‘and crane operators’ unions have been able to block ports for decades and jeopardize thousands of jobs before the Court of Auditors announced in 2011 that Marseille crane operators earn 4,000 euros net (after taxes) per month for 13 hours of effective work. week. On these extreme cases …

France doesn’t have found the user manual for managing the market economy front of the globalization. Should we be surprised? We do not master a game that we do refuse the rules … Hence the temptation, when the storm comes, to reject purely and simply this globalized capitalism. Very good, but what is the alternative?

The solution is not found in the programs of the right or those of the left parties. It must start from a pragmatic and not an ideological approach.

We are all in the same boat!