Isn’t this funny? It also explains the lack of political will for long-overdue reforms in France. Only one in three French people works in the real economy, two-thirds live, one way or another, off other people’s taxes. They won’t vote for politicians who say France’s absurd pensions and overblown state spending are unsustainable, they vote for those who promise to lower the already low retirement age even further. France is cooked. There will be no serious reforms. Higher interest spending will accelerate the rise in the debt/GDP ratio. France is heading into a debt crisis that will hit the entire eurozone. The ECB will, as always, bend the rules and its mandate and start printing money again, making savers and pensioners across Europe much poorer. The situation is so bad that no nice options remain.

Young people keep rediscovering socialism as if this time the incentives will differ, but guess what, they won’t. Poland is the best example. Under socialist central planning: bare shelves, queues for whatever the state allocated, food rationing, energy blackouts. Just a generation later, after free market and capitalism replaced socialism: choice and prosperity. Wherever the state replaced prices and profit with plans and commands, severe shortages followed, then coercion to hide them. Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia, Venezuela, and many others, not a single exception. Remove the link between effort and reward, and the incentive to build, create, and innovate disappears. The Nordics cited by socialists as exceptions are high-tax market economies with private ownership. They got rich on oil and gas first, places that reversed the order did not. Look at Venezuela: huge oil reserves, people starving under socialism. Socialism has always failed because it asks people to act as if self-interest and taking care of your family do not exist. It is against human nature, next time won’t be different.

The French labor code has more than 3,000 pages, Swiss labor law has 200. Where would you like to invest and create new jobs? France’s unemployment is 8.3%, Switzerland’s registered rate is 3.0%. French youth unemployment exceeds 21%. A typical French full-time private-sector wage is about €3,600 gross a month, in Switzerland it is about CHF 7,024 (€7,400). Why does the left love regulations so much? They hurt those they want to “protect.”