‘Enlightened global capitalism?’: The French say, ‘Non!’

June 4, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

The French have rejected the proposed European Constitution, and Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein is flummoxed. Our snail-devouring pals across the pond, Pearlstein wrote, had a chance to adopt “an enlightened form of global capitalism” but said, “Non!” What’s up with that?

I was amused by this sentence most of all: “President Jacques Chirac yesterday replaced his prime minister and shuffled his cabinet but never explained to his people why they can’t be rich if they insist on working a 35-hour week, retiring at 55 and overtaxing those who are productive and ambitious to subsidize those who aren’t.”

This is typical stuff from what I call the “Strapping Capitalist Lads” (SCLs), pro-business types who can’t understand why anyone would reject the idea that the accumulation of money is the raison d’etre for existence.

The French rejection of the EU constitution (and its rejection by voters in the Netherlands a few days later) came about due to a merger of the right and left. The right fears liberal immigration policies; the left worries about the fraying of the social welfare state and a headlong rush to less enlightened forms of capitalism.

The question, therefore, is deeper than a simple decision over whether or not the French wish to be rich. But even if it were that simple, why assume that the French have made the wrong decision?

SCLs assume that everyone wants to be rich. It never occurs to them that some people simply have a different value system, perhaps one that elevates leisure time and the pursuit of outside interests over the mad accumulation of cash. Maybe the French do wish to rich — just not in money.

A 35-hour week? Retirement at 55? Free health care and affordable (or free) college educations for your children? A guarantee of five weeks off every year? Sounds good to me.

If the choice is between (A) a comfortable middle-class existence with time for travel, leisure, family, the arts, intellectual pursuits (or, in the case of the French, romantic encounters — oo, la, la!) and (B) alleged riches at the price of a soulless life defined by the grim drumbeat of near-constant work, selecting A is not unreasonable. Some would even say it makes perfect sense.

We Americans are dogged by the Protestant work ethic, but we didn’t used to be so leisure-phobic. When I was a kid, it was widely assumed that by the year 2000, the four-day work week would be the standard. People looked forward to that and spoke of it as a worthy goal. (Of course, we were also promised robot servants and flying cars.)

It could also be that the Europeans are on to the “everyone can be rich” con that is an article of faith to U.S. economic libertarians. We in America have worshipped at the altar of “enlightened global capitalism” for some time now. Yet most of us aren’t rich; we merely work for the rich. I would gladly trade the hollow promises of bootstrap capitalism for, say, a workable health care system that covered everyone. (Besides, we can’t all be rich. If we were, then no one would be rich. It is, as the French say, “an existential paradox.” Well, I don’t really know that the French say that, but it sounds like something they would say.)

I also don’t buy Pearlstein’s description of French society. It sounds hyperbolic. That line about the productive being forced to subsidize the lazy is reminiscent of the tired, unimaginative attacks on U.S. social welfare programs by libertarians. It’s the lazy man’s way of shutting down every program aimed at the poor and those in need.

And no French person has a child with a job? Sure, unemployment is high there right now and has people on edge, but that doesn’t mean no one works. I doubt that everyone under 30 in Paris spends their days hanging out in bistros in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower wearing black turtlenecks and smoking harsh cigarettes while reading Kierkegaard.

In sum, Pearlstein’s column is oversimplified and fails to offer an adequate explanation for the French rejection. To it I say, “J’accuse!”

The predictions for a 4-day work week were based on an implicit assumption that the productivity gains made possible by technological advances would be fairly shared amonst workers, management, and owners/shareholders. As we have seen, though, thanks to the “Reagan Revolution” and its progeny, almost all of the productivity gains in the last 30 years have inured to management and to owners.

Workers’ average wages have, in inflation-adjusted terms, stagnated over that same period of time. Instead of keeping the same workers and working them less because they could accomplish the same output in fewer hours, management and owners have instead terminated the workers. While profits and management wages/perks have soared, these same terminated workers have been unable to replace their senority and wage level thanks to globalization, and the result is we have to work harder and longer to achieve what even approximates what we once had.

Also, Europeans seem to have put the “human” into “humanity.” God did not create us in His image and likeness to then simply have us worship at the altar of capitalism and greed. In fact, the accumulation of earthly possessions is the very antithesis of Christ’s teachings.

Just as the old saying “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure” makes sense to us to celebrate our individuality, so too does the saying, “There is more to life than work.”

  • Wait, wait, wait. You mean the French have been working 35-hour weeks, retiring at 55, taxing the uber-rich their fair share, having free health care and education all this time……and nobody has even mentioned it??

    Dang, if I had all that I’d have rejected the stupid EU constitution, too.

    Matter of fact, how come we’re not holding up the French model as the ideal goal for Americans? Sounds good to me!

  • Are you guys suggesting that there’s more to gastronomie than Big Macs and Whoppers? beverages beyond Budweiser and Miller’s? more to music than Lawrence Welk and hip-hop (btw, will anyone in the future ever “cover” today’s rap “songs”)? more to visual art than advertising T&A? more to relaxation than the boob tube?

    Actually, given the way we educate our children anymore (cutting out “electives” like art and music and even recess), I’m not sure people would know what to do with the extra hours if they could have them. We seem to be developing a “culture” designed to accommodate our two-income, unpaid-overtime “household units” and little more. When we get to indenturing our children to pay for housing, we won’t need much of anything beyond a plugged in iPod and enough soma tablets to keep everyone quiet.

    On a more serious note, I think the Democrats have got to come to grips with the idea of the market, both domestic and global. The Repugs like push the idea that the ‘free market” is some kind of natural phenomenon known only to them, perhaps divinely inspired (the invisible hand). They always overlook the troublesome assumptions behind Adam Smith’s classic theoretical market model.

    To begin with, Smith envisioned society as having a pre-market set of shared beliefs and values. He presumed that readers of his Wealth of Nations would have already been familiar with his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments, which covered basic shared notions of health, well-being, enjoyment, and what we today might call personal fulfillment. Those things are primary to all economic arrangements.

    Even the “free market” itself is not what the Repugs make it out to be. In Smith’s description it literally presupposes an infinite number of buyers and an infinite number of seller, no one of which, or block of which, can act in such a way as to have a measurable effect on setting prices. Under these purely theoretical conditions, price is determined by supply and demand, nothing else (including governments or churches).

    Contrast that with any real market. An infinite number of auto makers? of oil suppliers? of grocery chains? And that’s ignoring all the non-market mechanisms suppliers have at their disposal: absentee ownership, patent suppression, hostile takeovers, holding companies, paid-for tax loopholes, vertical monopolies, interlocking directorates, credit funding schemes, regulatory agencies peopled by industry stooges, and on and on and on.

    I think what Democrats need to do is learn (1) that domestic and global markets are real and will increasingly dominate the future (i.e., systems of governmental direction, left or right, really are doomed), (2) that they were not invented by the Repugs or God or Nature, and (3) that as human institutions we have every right, and obligation, to assess them, design or re-design them to suit us, regulate them, force them to be open (in contrast to, say, Cheney’s back room sneakery) and accessible (through extensive investment in “human capital” – i.e., health and education).

    The French and the Dutch voters seem to have grasped all this. I wonder if we ever will.

  • Thank you for providing some detail about why they would reject it, instead of the gloss that the mainstream media puts on it, which seems to be to only talk about it as a fight between political parties or as nationalism. Is that really what the problem is, though? Do they have reason to fear that a united Europe would change their work weeks, vacation, retirement, insurance, etc.? Can you give us any more details about what the actual constitution would mean and how strong a government it would be? Is it clear that nations, or number of people, with fewer benefits would outweigh those with more benefits? Or would the countries with fewer benefits tend to be ‘raised up’ to the level of France, etc?

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