Sardanapale

Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor, has found a fascinating research subject: a comparison between American, French, and German textbooks.

A few highlights from the piece he recently published in Foreign Policy:

“In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination.

Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation…

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities.

The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues.

Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.”

Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.”

This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972. ..

When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills.

For example, a one-year high school course on the inner workings of an economy developed by the French Education Ministry called Sciences Economiques et Sociales, spends two thirds of its time discussing the sociopolitical fallout of economic activity.

Chapter and section headings include “Social Cleavages and Inequality,” “Social Mobilization and Conflict,” “Poverty and Exclusion,” and “Globalization and Regulation.”

The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization.

Only one third of the course is about companies and markets, and even those bits include extensive sections on unions, government economic policy, the limits of markets, and the dangers of growth.

The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected.”

Britain is consumed by the controversy triggered by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pronouncement that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law was “unavoidable”.

Rowan Williams said that many UK citizens did not relate to the British legal system, and that adopting parts of Islamic law would help maintain “social cohesion”.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia courts, which should be part of “plural jurisdiction” in Britain.

Most commentators were appalled.

One of the most vocal and articulate critics was the British writer Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in Slate.com:

“Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear.

She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight.

What she ought to be able to say is, “I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced.” But what she will often be told is, “Your problem is better handled within the community.” And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country’s official spiritual authority.

You might argue that I am describing an extreme case (though, alas, now not an uncommon one), but it is the principle of equality before the law that really counts.”

I don’t share Hitchens’s concerns. It seems to me that he confuses two things: criminal and civil law.

Any viable system of criminal law must indeed entail a monopoly. All citizens of a country should enjoy equal protection under a single norm.

The full force of the law must bear on any man who behaves like the bastard in the not-so-hypothetical case Hitchens mentions.

A woman who came to the police with those complaints should secure a prosecution: the guy is clearly committing a number of crimes (assault, child abuse and sequestration).

But what Williams is talking about is civil law – disputes between individuals (or individuals and companies) – and there a plurality of jurisdictions is desirable.

People should be allowed to choose their arbiter – as long as that choice is freely accepted by all parties.

Britain itself has a history of plurality in civil jurisdictions. Until the 19th century, England and Wales had a system “chancery courts” (which was famously denounced by Dickens) alongside other common law tribunals.

Now the chancery courts have gone, but parallel systems of dispute settlement remain, from chartered arbitrators to religious community courts for Jews – which are all recognized in law.

Even Muslims, in matters of divorce, can already go before Islamic Sharia Council.

It sure beats me why any woman would take her divorce case to a bearded man working out of a prefab cabin in a dodgy part of London, as opposed to say Heather Mill’s lawyer.

But as long as it’s her choice, I don’t have a problem with it.

Reading Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare, I found a startling passage – the soliloquy of an Albanian partisan who is about to die after fighting the Germans in 1943.

Here it goes (I’m translating from my French version):

“I can’t go on any longer. One day, the weather will be radiant, the sky will be pure.

A commissar named Enver Hoxha said that communism would be implemented. Farewell comrades! I’m leaving. May you lead happy lives in the new Albania! (…)

From time immemorial, the destiny of this country, like the sun, has first arisen from the top of mountains. It’s cold. Talk to me about communism. How clear the sky is.”

Okay, I accept that Kadare was submitted to totalitarian censorship, that this kind of dross was forced on him and that it does not detract from his work.

But a paean to Hitler by a German novelist in the 1930s would be regarded today as a stain.

To my knowledge, few have picked up Kadare on this kind of nonsense, were it only to forgive it (which at least would show awareness that propaganda is an offense against literature.)

Répliques, the best program about culture and politics on French radio, was devoted to Simone de Beauvoir last week.

The host, Alain Finkielkraut, and his two guests talked at lengths about de Beauvoir’s literary talent, her contribution to feminism, her influential ideas on life and ageing, her eventful love life, etc.

Only at the end did Finkielkraut get to the crucial question of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s political blinkers:

“They both said that before World War II they had been indifferent to history. History violently burst into their lives with the war and the Resistance, and after that they wanted to take it into account.

So their eyes were supposedly opened by the conflict. But what strikes me is their incredible blindness. They saw and understood nothing.”

Finkielkraut illustrates his point with a few well-chosen quotes from de Beauvoir.

In a letter to Nelson Algren, she wrote of Albert Camus’ L’Homme révolté – the book that sealed Camus’ break with the fellow-traveling intelligentsia:

“Don’t read it. The Right laps it up because he demonstrates that staying in the comfort of your armchair and making money is enough to make you a romantic rebel.”

OK, people write silly things in private letters and you should not convict them on that basis.

But de Beauvoir said even worse things in her published texts.

In 1958, she called Pasternak’s work a “block of compact fog” that the bourgeoisie had hailed out of “fanaticism”.

(That comment, by the way, is much truer of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason than it is of Doctor Zhivago.)

And de Beauvoir also expressed her hatred of “bourgeois” liberalism thus:

“Truth is one; error takes many forms. It is surprising that the Right professes pluralism.”

You can listen to the program here – until Saturday 9th.

Last week I criticised George Bush’s “stimulus package” – an overtly Keynesian measure designed to spur America’s economy back into life.

But I hasten to add that have nothing against reducing taxes as a long-term strategy.

There is a world of difference between, say, Carter’s $50-for-everyone-rebates, which achieved nothing, and the Reagan tax cuts.

The latter had two features that the former lacked: a) they were permanent, and b) a focus on marginal rates.

Of those two features, the second is the least understood.

Contrary to popular opinion, the purpose of those cuts was not to help the rich.

The man who popularized them, Arthur Laffer, reminded us is a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece of the profound progressive effects of the cuts:

“The highest marginal income tax rate in 1980 was 70%. Today it is 35%. In the year Ronald Reagan took office (1981) the top 1% of income earners paid 17.58% of all federal income taxes. Twenty-five years later, in 2005, the top 1% paid 39.38% of all income taxes.

There are other ways of looking at tax receipts by income bracket. From 1981 to 2005, the income taxes paid by the top 1% rose to 2.96% of GDP, from 1.59% of GDP. There was also a huge absolute increase in real tax dollars paid by this group. In 1981, the total taxes paid in 2005 dollars by the top 1% of income earners was $94.84 billion. In 2005 it was $368.13 billion…

Let’s take a look at the bottom 75% of taxpayers over this same time period — the group current Democrats refer to as middle- and lower-income earners. From 1981 through 2005, the share of all income taxes paid by the bottom 75% of all income earners (as reported on the individual income tax returns) declined to 14.01% from 27.71%.

As a share of GDP, total taxes paid by the bottom 75% fell to 1.05% from 2.50%. The bottom 75% of all taxpayers today pay less than 35% of all the taxes paid by the top 1% of all income earners…

The important point here is that, over the last 25-plus years, the only group that experienced an increase in income taxes paid as a share of GDP was the top 1% of income earners.”

There is nothing wrong with reducing the tax burden on low and middle incomes. But the best way to spur growth is to act against punitive marginal rates, which both maximises revenue and boosts supply in the long term.

It is also important to remove special breaks that benefit tax consultants and their rich clients.

Bush, on the contrary, is using tax cuts to spur demand and has done nothing to simplify the tax code.

When it comes to cutting taxes, he has taken his cue from Carter not Reagan.

The whole Laffer article can be read here.