I remember a trip to the Louvre I was supposed to take back in the early 2000's that was cancelled because the highways around Paris were shut down. Too many protesters, they said. Apparently enough people thought an increase in the work week to 35 hours was worth shutting down the highways. Let's do the math on this:
35hrs/wk / 5days/wk = 7hrs/day
That's seven hours of work per day- or 9-5, with an hour lunch break. Nine to five. Americans today (and many even back then) would kill for a 9-5 job, and the French thought that was an outrageous demand. This was such an insult to them that they shut down major portions of their road system. When your citizens are protesting that 9-5 is too harsh a work schedule, you have bigger and deadlier problems than you thought.
Which is why Europe is failing. France is an especially bad case. The population is aging. The birth rate within the past 7 years is roughly 0.08%. Immigrants are offsetting the nearly non-existent birth rate, but are using the French welfare system while choosing to remain as foreign as they can.
Thousands of people rioted in the streets as the French government considers raising the legal age for retirement from 60...to 62.
"Presently, a worker who has paid into social security for 40.5 years is eligible for a full pension at the age of 60. Workers in the public sector receive 75% of their last-six-month's salary, and private sector workers, 50% of their earnings in the best 25 years.
The French Labor Ministry says there are 15.5 million retirees in France, which will grow to 18 million in 2030. The Pension Council estimates that this will have a devastating effect on the annual pension deficit, bringing it from $44 billion as of 2010 to $111 billion in 2030."
France is so heavily socialized that people riot and protest when the job market isn't as open as they believe it should be. The 2006 labor protests against the First Employment Contract bill were almost unbelievable.
If you were to get a job in France, it's yours for as long as you want it. The FEC bill would allow companies and employers the ability to fire an employee within the first two years of service if they felt the employee was not benefiting the company. The problem with being unable to fire someone is that it dries up the job market; instead of being able to take a job someone was fired for (say, due to incompetence or lack of skill) you could only compete for jobs that weren't already taken...and once a job was taken, that employment opportunity was essentially lost. To have students protest in the streets because their "right" to employment was threatened was both utterly inane and completely beyond selfish.
What's happening in Europe is an amazing chance for America to realize that a welfare state is not a viable option for survival. To foster an atmosphere where people are so dependent on the government for everything that they burn busses in the streets when the government realizes that it can no longer afford to support everyone is dangerous, foolish, and stupid.
When the federal government takes over the majority of the auto industry, our top banking corporations, and health care, looks to raise taxes, and then proceeds to run our deficit over $1T (that's T for Trillion) how on earth can the Chief Executive, in good conscience, expect people to turn to him and say "thank you"?
We're not in Rome, and we shouldn't be going down the same road the Europeans are on. Our leadership needs to realize that they are part of something bigger and more important than themselves and their opinions. A wise man once said "Learn from the mistakes of others; you won't live long enough to make them all yourself." Perhaps we should sit up, pay attention, and learn from France and the UK.
And no, I don't want my cake. You can keep the stupid cake. What I want is my nation to not end up in history's welfare waste bin.
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