In Defense of French Dirigisme

By John R. MacArthur

They live longer. They eat better. They work less. So why do Americans want to beat up on the French?

Usually I give The New York Times's right-wing columnist John Tierney a pass in the morning. I like my ideologues witty—or at least outrageous—and Tierney, like his stablemate David Brooks, almost never delivers on either count (except, perhaps, in his weird defenses of Wal-Mart).

But Tierney's recent column on French social unrest caught my eye—not only because I'm half-French, but also because I'm interested in the public-relations tactics of the pro-Bush crowd. As Tierney's ideological predecessor (and former Republican press agent) William Safire well understood, when things get rough for your side, it's useful to change the subject.

Tierney finds it amusing that France is in upheaval over a new labor law, the Contrat Premiere Embauche (contract for first-time hires), that would make it easier for businessmen to fire young workers within the first two years of their employment. Private employers in France pay a heavy price for firing anybody—in justifying paperwork and money—so the theory is that they would hire more raw, untested types if it weren't so hard getting rid of the deadbeats.

If you're an employer, this makes perfect sense; if you're a member of France's “rightist” government, it's a great way to satisfy your corporate backers, as well as appearing to address the problem of high youth unemployment. If, on the other hand, you're a college student or trade unionist, the new labor law sounds like what it doubtless will be: discrimination permitting bosses to exploit and churn the lowest-paid people with the least seniority.

In “Who Moved My Fromage?,” Tierney labors too hard to be satirical about the French “facade of arrogance,” so the jokes turn labored very quickly: “Someone needs to rescue France from its self-proclaimed malaise. Close to a quarter of its young people are unemployed, but they're too busy burning cars to look for jobs.” There goes the drum in Doc Severensen's Tonight Show band: ba-dum-bump!

But underneath Tierney's strained humor (he suggests a new Marshall Plan, of American self-help wisdom) lies authentic hostility toward France's highly centralized social-support system: “Today's French can't even stand up to unarmed foreigners. When French young adults were asked what globalization meant to them, half replied 'fear.' ” Now that's really funny, especially contrasted with fearless post-9/11 America.

Of course, Tierney doesn't know much about France. When he and the like-minded Thomas Friedman mock the alleged French aversion to work and competition, they miss an important point. Not unlike the Japanese, the French idea of “national solidarity” has long dictated a dirigiste industrial policy, with big government subsidies poured into public-private business ventures thought to have good export and wage potential. When it suits the French to stimulate their private sector, they just do it, without getting hung up on liberal economic theory or anti-trust doctrine. Conversely, when the government believes that deregulation and competition might help, it's perfectly capable of acting more capitalistically.

The day that Tierney's column appeared, The Wall Street Journal, beacon of free-market orthodoxy, published two approving stories about French economic success—one dirigiste and one entrepreneurial. On the front page we learned that France gets 78 percent of its nationalized electrical production from nuclear-power plants, far ahead of second-place Germany, with 28 percent, and the fifth-place United States, with 19 percent. This far-sighted government-mandated policy has greatly reduced France's greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as its dependence on Mideastern oil. “With oil dependence and global warming at the top of the international energy agenda,” wrote the Journal, “France's experience is drawing interest from the U.S. to China.”

Elsewhere the Journal reported that by loosening its national telecommunications monopoly, France has become a leader in broadband services: “Thanks to deregulation six years ago, French consumers have access to high-speed Internet service that is much faster and cheaper than in the U.S.”

Why don't Tierney and others note such French achievements? Partly it's ideological intolerance and partly, I imagine, it stems from envy. Ideologues want purity and most impure Frenchmen don't believe that capitalism is an inherent force for good. Meanwhile, they're living longer and eating better food than we are.

But let's not forget PR as a motive for Tierney's column. Real median weekly earnings in the United States are falling, in part because of “free trade” and the bipartisan bludgeoning of labor unions into nothingness. We're bogged down in a neo-Wilsonian oil grab in Iraq, which is costing a human fortune in lost lives and limbs, not to mention a dollar fortune in public funds. And our public schools, practically speaking, constitute a system of racial and class apartheid that makes the awful Arab/African ghettos in suburban Paris look almost hopeful.

Whatever their own hypocrisy, racism, and corruption, the French look pretty smart by comparison with the Americans. Having learned in 1956 (the Suez crisis) and 1973 (the OPEC embargo) about the unreliability of Arab oil supplies, they could afford, thanks to their nuclear policy, to split with the United States on Iraq. Whatever the merits of a “flexible” labor market, at least French unions still have enough dues-paying members to put up a fight. Whatever the plight of immigrant Muslims, the French are graduating, on a percentage basis, twice as many students with bachelor's degrees in science, math, computer technology, and engineering as we are in America.

But in truth, I'm not as concerned about the ability of French youth to get secure jobs as I am about the decline in satiric skill in the United States. Some may recall Thomas Friedman's big laugh line about France's rejection last year of the European constitution: “French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.” This might be mildly funny but for a 2005 French government study that found that the 35-hour week created about 350,000 jobs, from its application in 1998 through 2002, and that the affected businesses enjoyed productivity gains of 4 to 5 percent during the same period.

Maybe the French don't need to work longer hours so much as American columnists need to spend more time reading the paper. It's one of the easiest jobs in the world.