Paging Monsieur Napoleon

PARIS –  Ah, the joys of Paris in the springtime. Riots every day and night; vandals smashing store windows and looting; traffic jams horrendous even by this city’s standards; air, train, and metro disruptions. Tear gas wafts in the air.

Add to this toxic mess the ongoing guerilla war between Uber cars and Paris’ notoriously nasty taxi drivers; a virtual civil war within the fragmented Socialist government of President Francois Hollande; a little war in the Sahara; and an economy that has all the get up and go to a flat Michelin tire.

Even with all this craziness going on, the City of Light is still exquisite though too often painful and frustrating. I have always compared Paris to being deeply in love with a totally difficult, beautiful, self-centered woman who does not give a damn about you.

French workers and students are taught hatred of business by their leftwing teachers who majored in such useless vocations as cultural anthropology and sociology. The result has been a huge surplus of youth with fancy titles but no work skills at all. Youth unemployment in France is about 30%. In Germany, by contrast, a very sensible apprenticeship system prepares youth for real, useful jobs.

Unsurprisingly, French students are always demonstrating and demanding ludicrous benefits from Papa Government. Two years ago, right by my apartment near the Ecole Militaire, I was amazed to see teenage high school students demanding high pensions for those over 60 years old!

While militant workers and sociologists make France miserable, the government of President Francois Hollande has managed to become the most unpopular government in modern French history. Hollande’s popularity ratings now hover around a pathetic 16%.

Some even wonder if the demoralized president will run for a second term in 2017. Right now, far right candidate Martine LePen is running ahead of the miserable Hollande. Center-right candidate and former president Nicholas Sarkozy, who wears elevator shoes, even had the nerve to call Hollande, “a short, little fat man.”

Hollande is beset by 10% unemployment, a stupid little stalemated “anti-terrorist” war in the Sahara that he began to great fanfare,  yawning budget deficits, and the inability to do anything to change France’s economic stagnation and malaise.

The answer is clear: cut government paper-passers by 25%; cut vainglorious military spending; cut taxes no matter how loudly the left screams; and clear the thicket of foolish government regulations that binds the hands and animal spirits of this great nation.  But doing all this may require another Napoleon.

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