For the fourth straight weekend in a row, protesters donning their “gilets jaunes” in Paris continued their rioting, expanding the scope of their demands to the economically implausible.
President Emmanuel Macron correctly ended the much maligned and environmentally unnecessary gas tax that had initiated the riots, but the protesters still aren’t happy. Quite simply, the yellow vests want to have their cake and eat it too.
Their demands — or at least, the closest thing to the official statement from a group composed of far-right wing ethnonationalists, left-wing communists, and everyone in between — include but are not limited to an increase in pensions and minimum wage, an end to the withholding of taxes, abolition of taxes on credit card swipes, more rent control, 5 million additional public housing units, an end to at-will employment through required permanent contracts, an end to austerity measures, and a cap on personal taxes so that they don’t surpass 25 percent of income.
Sounds feasible!
Some demands, such as a program for integrating immigrants into French culture, make sense and are long overdue. But most of this Christmas wish list is filled with things the government cannot possibly deliver.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone free housing, benefits, disability pension, and job security. If the yellow vests want to embrace an ethno-Soviet welfare state for the white citizenry, they can, but only at the cost of ending economic growth and what remains of the French free market.
For all of Macron’s missteps on immigration, he has instituted necessary neoliberal economic reforms that have prevented an already ailing nation from imploding after just a few years of socialist mismanagement. Macron slashed taxation on capital and corporations as well as a “wealth tax.” He signed decrees reducing union chokeholds over job creators and making it easier for employers to hire and fire people. Since the beginning of his presidency, the sky-high French unemployment rate has fallen by an impressive five points to a still-unimpressive 9.1 percent.
The French economy has long been bogged down by a bureaucracy and legal code which disincentives entrepreneurship and growth, and Macron’s reforms can’t reverse course overnight. But the yellow vests are wrong to succumb to rage and demand that he further feed into the French nanny state. Macron may be accused of being apathetic towards the yellow vests, but the yellow vests are more certainly apathetic to economic facts.
