Macron Needs to Hold Strong
The French are some of the Most Ungrateful and Arrogant People on Earth, and Macron Cuts an Admirable Figure to Fend off the Insolence of Strikers and Protesters
“As is often the case, the French prefer to fight over symbols rather than engage with facts and figures”— Paul Taylor
“I’ve often been reproached for being alone in making proposals,” he {Macron} once said. “One sometimes has to accept being alone, being an ice-breaker; afterwards you need to bring others behind you.” —The Economist
Pardon me if I generalize,
The French are a ridiculous people who think they have the right to have their cake and eat it too. Nothing is ever enough for them. Nothing. Ever. The chronic distemper of the French personality explains their long history of flirtation with one extreme or the other, socialism and fascism. They can’t decide which they would prefer. Perhaps that’s because neither is extreme enough for them. The one reason for which French democracy has ever held is that the country is so convulsed with romantic flights of fancy, it’s impossible for dictatorship to plant its seeds. But that can change.
France is a Bastion of Collectivism
The French might be too impatient for democracy and too lazy for capitalism, but thus far they’re too collectively bipolar and rebellious to submit to tyranny. From the despotism of the ancien regime; to the bloodletting of the French Revolution, climaxing with Napoleon, invading every other country just to see if he could conquer it like a madman; to the Paris Commune of 1870, that threatened to turn the country into a Communist state; to the Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation in World War Two, under which a good proportion of France was not only compliant and docile but were active collaborators; and the sporadic student revolution of 1968—the French definition of freedom is an idolatrous temperamental devotion to an idealized revolutionary cause. In a column on France’s antidemocratic vicissitudes, the Economist said recently,
“If Russia’s war in Ukraine exposed Germany’s industrial reliance on Moscow, it has laid bare in France a different sort of dependence: a fatal fascination with Russia. On the far left, this is a relic of the Bolshevik revolution, anti-Americanism and communism. During the cold war, the French Communist party, looked to Moscow and dropped the hammer and sickle from its membership card only in 2013. On the far right, it stems from admiration for patriotic nationalism and authoritarian leadership.”
PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy
Art Media
British Library Newspaper Archive
France is a Breeding Ground for Tyrannical Majorities
The French are probably the most self-absorbed and arrogant people in Europe, who think their food, their wine, and their culture are the best in the world, and that their cities and women are the prettiest, and that because this is so, it makes them the most deserving people, too. There is actually some truth to the former. I don’t deny France’s cultural superiority. French literature, art, and French philosophy is superlative—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Voltaire, Camus, Cezanne, Monet. But I am under no illusions that the flourishing of a culture has any relationship to the virtue of a people. Moreover, I don’t like wine, but since I do like fine art, you might say, I venerate French civilization while I abhor the lifestyle. I’m an anglophile, because I’m probably too much of a naiive American to understand any European country besides the UK (if they’re even a part of Europe) with their individualism, their jealousy about privacy and self-ownership, their sensitivity about honor, greasy food, rowdy pubs, jolly company, dry humor, and bleak weather.
For as far as political economy and free societies go, from a neoliberal standpoint—France is without question, a decadent country, teeming with worrisome illiberal, revolutionary, romantic, anticapitalist, antibourgeois enthusiasm. Since popular opinion in France is so thoroughly corrupted by the average Frenchman’s narrow ce la vie vision of existence: is all the reason Macron’s pension reform must succeed.
Valeria Mongelli Bloomberg
Macron somewhat of an exception to the pettiness of his countrymen (besides his total cowardice about fully supporting Ukraine) ran for office as a centrist, who would reform France’s pension system. Since he has proposed to raise France’s retirement age from 62-64, the French people have taken to the streets en masse to protest in the hundreds of thousands. For the last several weeks, unions went on strike shutting down transportation, schools and electricity. Despite the necessity for the government to cut pension spending, with declining birthrates and an increasing elderly population, the French people—who disdain to think rationally, with a temperamental hatred of work and a compulsive fanatical subservience to their base self-interest—could care less.
Clement Mahoudeau/AFP via Getty Images
Clement Mahoudeau/AFP via Getty Images
In the Washington Post, “Like it or Not, France Needs Macron’s Pension Reform,” the Bloomberg editors write,
“Macron’s new plan, or something like it, is certainly needed. Despite some earlier modifications, France’s public-pension system is unaffordably generous. It lets most workers retire on a full state pension at 62 so long as they’ve paid contributions for 42 years. On average, people stop working earlier than in most other countries and therefore spend more years in retirement. Payments also replace a bigger share of wages. The cost is enormous: roughly 14% of gross domestic product (compared to 7% in the US). If you’re wondering why public spending in France is about 60% of GDP, the highest in Europe, here’s one reason.”
And in Politico, “Why Macron Must Win His Pension Reform Battle,” Paul Taylor says,
“For the last decade, electorates in most EU countries have accepted a later retirement age, largely without protest, as the inevitable economic and demographic consequence of longer life expectancy and lower birth rates, which results in fewer workers and more retirees.
It’s a matter of generational justice that as we all live longer, people should work longer for their own pension and not expect younger cohorts to carry a growing burden. Given the evolution of housing prices and the increasingly precarious nature of work contracts, boomers already possess more wealth than the young can even hope to acquire.
Only the French continue to resist this reality. They regard the unfunded pay-as-you-go state pension system as the bedrock of their social model. Attempts to introduce private pension funds or personal retirement accounts, à la the United Kingdom, have never caught on in this nation, which is both revolutionary by temperament and deeply risk-averse when it comes to managing personal finances.”
In addition there is a national security argument that France can’t increase defense spending without reforming the exorbitant pension system, which Macron himself has also highlighted, as the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal writes,
“the spending to meet the threats won’t be possible without reforms that make pensions and entitlements more sustainable. This is a debate that needs to take place across Europe and in the U.S. The end of the Cold War created the illusion that welfare states could coast along with ever-more generous benefits. But they can’t if democracies want to defend themselves against authoritarian threats.”
The Harm of Insurrectionary Unions to Self-Government
So while the French for the last six weeks have staged destructive protests, against the prospect of modest pension reform, even though from a distance, it may look like powerful unions are thriving, a recent article in Foreign Policy says,
“French unions are wheezing. Membership numbers are down sharply, and many labor leaders feel their organizations have failed to stem the neoliberal wave that has been eroding workers’ rights for decades—and has only accelerated under Macron. Since he took power in 2017, Macron—a former investment banker who campaigned on a centrist, pro-business platform—has loosened the rules for firing employees, capped compensations for illegal layoffs, and favored agreements between management and workers at the company-level rather than for entire sectors, which critics say undermines employees’ bargaining power.”
Of course it undermines their bargaining power. Good. Workers’ “rights” are uneconomic, illiberal, antidemocratic, and unconstitutional instruments of monopoly and coercion. Any union doesn’t just slow down growth, make it hard for businesses to make profits, increase unemployment, and exacerbate inflation, but the unchecked power of public sector unions can shut down vital services.
Any belief in the value of special privileges for workers, in exclusion to the interest of consumers and private citizens, is bound to be political in nature and steeped in class antagonism. No one who understands economics and cares for the rule of law, on the other hand, can have any appreciation for the influence of workers’ rights and unions’ nefarious coercive organizing. From exaggerated self-importance, not helped by the worldwide cultural myth of the superior virtue of the working class, union members consider themselves permitted to do whatever they can get away with to secure power for themselves, no different from self-serving politicians. So it makes sense that populists and unions tend to go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, I read that both the socialist far left, and Marine Le Pen’s nationalist far right, want to lower France’s retirement age from 62 to 60.
With the necessity for Macron to reform social security to increase defense spending, and on account of the sensibleness of his proposal to raise the retirement age, when people are living longer, and thus can work for longer, these strikers and the majority of the French who oppose the reform show how tyrannical France could potentially become, at virtually any moment. Thus it’s all the more important for democracy in the west and the rule of law, that Macron resists public pressure to back down. Though he has lost support on the center left and the center right in his coalition in the French parliament, he needs hold the line. Fiscal prudence in the west depends on it. No one likes Macron anyway. He needs to think to hell with his public image, and be a proper public-spirited republican, a virtuous classical liberal, and he needs to put the greater good of the country first, before the insolence of the mob of selfish old people, flagrant nationalists and socialists.
This is a Matter of Existential Import
What is happening in France has echoes with Thatcher’s denationalization of the British coal mines. Violent clashes between the police and picketers stretched on for months and brought the country to the brink of civil war. It was the most difficult time for her in her premiership. She was under pressure from all sides, within her government and without, to make peace and broker a deal with the unions, but she resisted. And because of her strength and hers alone, and the valor of the police, law and order prevailed, democracy survived, and her free market reforms made Britain rich.
Macron is no Margaret Thatcher, but still just as Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine has channelled Churchill, so Macron should channel the iron lady. As rent-seeking old people and their cronies in government worldwide resist unpopular pension reforms—with aging populations and declining birth rates, the world is watching to see whether Macron can stave off the masses or he will yield. This is as much about liberal democracy as it is about capitalism. If the unions and masses are victorious, it will prove that populism and tyrannical majorities are more powerful than unpopular politicians having the moral courage to make necessary social security reform for the individuals of the future. It would be a terrible blow to minority rights were he to fail. It would be the biggest assault on the individual by the collective, within a country, since the January 6th insurrection in America.
The future for the next generation hangs in the balance here. The outcome of this conflict is a weather vane, signaling whether we care enough about the future to make reasonable sacrifices, or rentseeking unions and entitled pensioners will be allowed to capture the future for their own group-interest.
—Jay