by Theodore Dalrymple
According to a poll carried out by the Figaro newspaper,
only 17% of the French believe that 2014 will be a good year, but in fact it
started very well for France. Only 1,064 cars were burned by youths in the banlieues this New Year’s Eve—about a hundred
fewer than last year. Who says that there is no progress? The French Minister
of the Interior congratulated the 57,000 policemen throughout the country who
were on duty that night for their preventive work (one fewer cars1 burned per
570 policemen), but he still won’t publish the number of cars burned in France
annually for fear of provoking youth to an attempt to beat the record. Yes,
youth is the idealistic springtime of man’s life.
Another optimistic way of looking at the figures is to compare the number
of cars burned with the number of cars not burned.
This will put the figure into better perspective. About 19,999,000 cars in
France were not burned on New Year’s Eve;
that is to say, 99.995% of them. Surely this is the way the figures should be
presented to improve the population’s morale? Instead of the murder rate, then,
we should have the non-murder rate. The result is even better for most
European countries: About 99.999% of people are not murdered in any given year.
“As Bakunin pointed out a long time ago, the destructive urge is a creative urge.”
We should always remember the story of the Soviet commissar who, when asked
by a soldier in the audience he was addressing whether it was true that there
were more cars in the United States than in the Soviet Union, thought for a
moment and then replied, “Yes, comrade, but we in the Soviet Union have more parking
spaces.”
However, we must not be too optimistic that optimism can be instilled in
this way, for almost any statistic can be viewed in a dark light. From the
point of view of supposedly Keynesian economics, for example, the decline in
the number of cars burned in France on New Year’s Eve was a change in precisely
the wrong direction. As everyone knows the European economy is in the doldrums,
suffering from a lack of aggregate demand. Government spending cannot take up
the slack because governments such as that of the French have been running
deficits for forty years, and if they were to try to increase their expenditure
yet further there would be another debt crisis (if the first such crisis has
ever gone away, that is).
No, the solution can come only from real growth; that is to say, from the
private sector. The French have been accused, because of their immemorial
Colbertian dirigiste economic culture, of lacking economic initiative. (They
were famously even once accused by a great American thinker of lacking a word
for entrepreneur.) That is why the ambition of so many of
them is to be a fonctionnaire, a civil servant.
This view of the French, however, is in complete contradiction with the
initiative shown by youth in the banlieues. Having
read Mr. Krugman in The New York Times, they have been persuaded that there is
a chronic lack of demand in the French economy that they have decided to
stimulate by burning cars. What better stimulation, indeed, could be imagined?
The roughly 40,000 cars burned a year (as I have said, no one knows the precise
figures) provide employment for thousands of people. The cars have to be
replaced, so manufacturing is encouraged; service industries such as sales and
insurance are likewise given a fillip. When M. (soon to be president) Sarkozy
called the rabble who rioted in 2005 “scum,” he should really have thanked them
for their presciently Keynesian conduct.
But M. Chirac, the then-president, was the hero of the hour. He wisely
decreed that the insurance companies, whose policies had hitherto excluded
damage caused by civil riot, revolution, and war as grounds for claim, that
henceforth (and retrospectively in this case) these exclusions should not hold;
and he thereby spread the Keynesian benefits of the riots throughout the French
economy and population. Equity and justice required no less; the costs and the
benefits were spread equally. Furthermore, government debts were completely
unaffected by this. No more perfect way of stimulating demand could be
imagined. It was not only effective; it was the very instance of liberty,
equality, and fraternity in action.
I regret to say, however, that the French government, completely lacking in
imagination, has since taken no advantage of the method of stimulating the
economy with which it was so selflessly provided by the idealistic youth of the banlieues in 2005. Instead of encouraging those
youth, it has taken measures to dissuade them—for example, by posting policemen
all around the country and arresting those whom they catch in the process of
stimulating the economy. Some of them it even punishes, thus discouraging the
very kind of entrepreneurial activity for which it should be thankful.
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