2012-07-25

France Still as Socialist Today as in Toqueville's Time


A few days ago, I was talking to a university professor near the retirement age, and he showed me he's payslip: while he's making about 12,000€ a month (quite a high figure if you ask me!) after all the deductions the government makes, he receives only about 4,800€ in his account at the end of the month, on which he has to pay income tax (about 800€ according to him). So his net income after all direct taxation is 4,000€.

That's the cost of running this enormous and ineficient government, and you have to remember that the university professor's income is quite average, and that most politicians in France will tell you that there isn't enough taxes (indeed there isn't, since the country has been running massive deficits every year, for the past 50 years).

France has been unable to make any political and economic progress in the past 200 years, and has been stuck in a socialist mindset ever since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Here's an interesting quote from Alexis de Toqueville, that matches 100% my current impressions from France, and what we're hearing in the media.
"One thing was not ridiculous, but really ominous and terrible; and that was the appearance of Paris on my return. [...] I saw society cut into two: those who possessed nothing, united in a common greed; those who possessed something, united in a common terror. There were no bonds, no sympathy between these two great sections; everywhere the idea of an inevitable and immediate struggle seemed at hand. Already the bourgeois and the peuple (for the old nicknames had been resumed) had come to blows, with varying fortunes, at Rouen, Limoges, Paris; not a day passed but the owners of property were attacked or menaced in either their capital or income: they were asked to employ labour without selling the produce; they were expected to remit the rents of their tenants when they themselves possessed no other means of living."
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville 

My conclusion about France, is that democracy doesn't work for them, and the only periods in their history where they have been making progress is during Monarchy or other forms of oligarchism (such as during the Napoleon and De Gaulle periods).

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