And all of France is in a perpetual orgasm over her being the first female head of the Socialist Party, how she breathes new blood into French politics, how she's an attractive independent woman, blah blah blah (kind of like us here with Barack Obama). Besides, how can you fail with a name like Segolene ROYAL?
So France is in its typical French doldrums of low economic growth, high unemployment, over rigid labor market, high government debt etc. etc., and what brand new, exciting, bold and revolutinoary course of action does this new celebrity darling of the socialists recommend?
"Yet the 100 detailed policies that Ms Royal unveiled to steer France down this soft-focus path amounted, in the main, to a long wishlist of spending pledges, with little explanation as to how any of them would be paid for. Thus she promised to increase the minimum wage to €1,500 ($1,950) a month, to introduce interest-free loans worth €10,000 for every 18-year-old, to push up unemployment benefits to 90% of previous salary, to raise the lowest pensions by 5%, to renationalise and merge Electricité de France and Gaz de France, to penalise firms that pay dividends rather than reinvest profits, to boost public R&D spending by 10% a year, to cut class sizes in poor areas and much else. "
The same old socialist crap.
A minimum wage that translates into $24,000 a year for a burger flipper? You're kidding me right? And you wondering why a Big Mac costs $3.82 in France?
Unemployment benefits of 90% the previous salary? WHY THE HELL WORK????? Work one day and then get fired! Boom, set for life!
A 10,000 Euro interest free loan for all 18 year olds? For what purpose? If they're anything like American 18 year olds you can expect them not only to piss the money away, but default on the loan too (which no doubt the good socialists will allow them to do).
And then there's the standard "let's renationalize everything." Yeah, that's working wonders for Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales and their endeavors to seek foreign direct investment.
But my favorite, for it shows you just how out of touch socialists are with the realities of economics;
She wants to penalize corporations that pay a dividend instead of reinvest the profit.
Isn't it the leftists that complain when corporations don't pay their beleaguered shareholders the dividends they're entitled to and instead keep those profits for their greedy selves?
And let's say the corporations do reinvest? To what point and purpose? It seems Royal would just nationalize them anyway.
Now, truthfully, I don't care what happens to France along the lines of their economy, it's more of an interesting spectator sport as I observe what those zany French are up to. Additionally I believe if a people are uneducated in economics, then they're doomed to suffer the consequences and get to sleep in the bed they make (Venezuela, Bolivia, California).
But what I truly savor is how you have an entire country that just doesn't seem to get it. That if you make it so inhospitable for business to set up shop in your country by forcing them to pay high taxes, over-regulating them and constantly threatening them with nationalization, that somehow they're supposed to come flocking to your country with billions in FDI. That if you effectively neuter your labor force by essentially paying them not to work, and taxing them at 53% GDP somehow wealth production and economic growth is going to occur. And when the inevitable economic consequences of lower economic growth, lower standards of living, a slothful labor force and over all just an inferior economy materialize, I take no greater joy of comparing them to their hated-economic rival, rubbing those economic realities in their faces.
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