Sardanapale

Having just re-read Frédéric Bastiat’s tract Government, I find it as illuminating and relevant as it was in 1848.

The French state is constantly expected to act.

As Bastiat put it, “100.000 mouths from the press and public forums” urge it to at once:

“Organize labor and workmen;
Root out selfishness;
Repress the insolence and tyranny of capital;
Make experiments on manure and eggs;
Cover the country with railways;
Irrigate the plains;
Plant the hills;
Set up model farms;
Set up social workshops;
Colonize Algeria;
Nurture children;
Instruct youths;
Assist the aged;
Send the inhabitants of towns into the country;
Equalize the profits of all trades;
Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow;
Emancipate Italy, Poland and Hungary;
Breed and perfect the saddle-horse;
Encourage the arts, and provide us with musicians and ballerinas;
Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant navy;
Discover truth, and put a grain of reason into our heads. The mission of government is to enlighten, to develop, to extend, to fortify, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people.”

Inevitably, 160 years on, some these calls need updating.

Experiments in agriculture technology can only be carried out with the precautionary principle firmly in mind. Horses are no longer central to transportation policy.

Recolonizing Algeria is out of the question: the state is now supposed to rebuild Afghanistan.

Italy and Poland are free: the places to emancipate now are Darfur and Tibet.

But the main thrust of Bastiat’s list of demands is strikingly current.

The French state is still supposed to protect workers from the rough winds of trade and all hazards of life, to provide more jobs, teachers, cheap loans, as well as support for farmers, artists, and pretty much everyone else.

I would only ass one item to bring the list completely up to date: at the minute the government is meant to shelter people from the worldwide rise in oil prices.

I don’t mean to knock Nicolas Sarkozy’s latest proposals on this matter (he wants to use surplus income from the gasoline sales tax to reduce the fuel bill of the low-income households – not a too idiotic an idea if you insist on doing something.)

I’m only noting that Sarkozy answered urgent demands arising from the depth of French society.

As always, especially when confronted by special interested using violence, like the fishermen currently blocking French ports and fuel depots, the “hyperpresident” is only too happy to spring into action.

It would never occur to him to say: “You’re asking too much. Go away.”

Instead he encourages France’s fateful tendency to believe – as Bastiat put it – that the state

“has bread for all mouths, work for all hands, capital for all enterprises, credit for all projects, oil for all wounds, balm for all sufferings, advice for all perplexities, solutions for all doubts, truths for all intellects, diversions from all troubles, milk for infancy, and wine for old age – which can provide for all our wants, anticipate all our wishes, satisfy all our curiosity, correct all our errors, repair all our faults, and exempt us henceforth from the necessity for foresight, prudence, judgment, sagacity, experience, order, economy, temperance, and activity. “

The French cannot see that these contradictory demands are rooted in childish conception of government, as an ominpotent entity that stands above society and showers goodies from on high.

The left’s response to Sarkozy’s fuel proposal wonderfully illustrates this delusional view of the state.

Socialist leader François Hollande says the fuel tax surplus should be given back to all drivers, and restated his plans to hand out “gasoline vouchers” to a thankful populace.

The idea is no longer to rob Peter to pay Paul. It is to rob Peter and Paul to pay Peter and Paul. As Bastiat put it in a celebrated formula:

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

No one realizes that the average citizen loses out from this transfer: it has a cost and entrench the powers of the state.

The French state is not Big Brother, but Big Mother – a caring presence that stands above you, ready to be milked.

Its wards seek to extract as much as they can from it, while giving as little as possible.

We constantly talk of “brotherhood” and “solidarity”. But few nations try harder to live off the public purse, without realizing that in so doing it is only cheating itself.

Click here for a translation of Bastiat’s Government.

Répliques, the best talk show on French radio, was recently disrupted by a posse of protesters.

They read out statements in favor of various oppressed individuals and groups, before being chucked out.

The incident was in keeping with both the topic of the program – the legacy of May 1968 – and the venue – the Théâtre de l’Odéon which was at that time occupied by students and transformed into a freewheeling forum.

I wondered whether the invasion of the Répliques set might have been staged – it would have been a fit tribute to a generation that wanted “imagination in power”.

But Finkielkraut’s incandescent reaction – his natural eloquence magnified by anger – convinced me otherwise.

The whole incident is worth listening to.

But for me, the high point of the broadcast came at the beginning.

After introducing his guests, Finkielkraut offered this profound assessment of de Gaulle – the bête noire of the 1968 students:

“You can say that General de Gaulle is the twentieth-century French politician who, for better and perhaps also for worse, put imagination in power.

He led France to believe that it had an epic destiny. He gave epic overtones to a policy that was in fact confronted with very mundane issues.”

Here are my last two cut-and-paste jobs on British articles about 1968. Both are from the current issue of Prospect Magazine.

The first is a cogent analysis by Jacques Rupnik of the deep differences between the tragedy that was the Prague Spring and the Parisian farce:

From Paris to Prague and from Warsaw to Berlin, not to mention Berkeley or Mexico, there was a generational moment of “incoherent fraternity” (Paul Berman): similar fashions, listening to the same music, the shared distrust of political establishments…

But in reality the language and the political aspirations differed substantially.

The “alienation” in a consumer society and the traps of “formal democracy” denounced by French radicals were by no means scorned in societies then emerging from 20 years of real socialism.

The French 68ers wanted to reclaim the purity of the socialist idea from the communist grip, while the Czechs, who had learned the hard way about such things, were trying to dilute it with all the intellectual trends of the time, from psychoanalysis to the Christian-Marxist dialogue.

For French 68ers the word “Europe” was then associated with the “common market,” and references to “European civilisation” smacked of colonialism in the aftermath of the Algerian war.

Their international horizon was “third worldish,” with the opposition to the war in Vietnam, support for Mao and for Cuban-style “revolution in the revolution” (the title of an essay by Régis Debray…)

In Prague, the identification with European culture was part of an emancipation from the post-war Sovietised eastern orientation of official cultural life.

As Milan Kundera put it ten years later: “The Parisian May was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague spring was an explosion of post-revolutionary skepsis… The Parisian May was radical. The Prague spring was a popular revolt of the moderates.”

And what of the respective legacies? In Paris, it was “if you can’t beat them, join them.” The 68ers have gradually conquered the institutions they had challenged and reached the peak of their power in French society.

From feminism to environmentalism and multiculturalism, they have imposed their agenda. In the words of Cohn-Bendit: “We have won culturally and socially while, fortunately, losing politically.”

The fate of their Czech counterparts was very different. They were purged and expelled from all walks of public life for two decades.

So when the “velvet revolution” of 1989 surprised them (and the rest of their countrymen), they were pushing 50 and had lost 20 of their most creative years.

1989 was anti-68 in the sense that it did not try to pick up where the ‘68 reform movement stopped: it sought western market democracy rather than the utopia of “socialism with a human face.”

The second piece is by PJ O’Rourke:

Mind-altering drugs were the best part of the 1960s. Nowadays these drugs have a bad reputation simply because lots of people died from them and many more had their lives ruined. But let’s look on the bright side. I give an example from personal experience.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine and I both suffered that common malady of late middle age: debilitating depression. My friend is six years older than I – just old enough to have missed the era of being one’s own pharmacist.

When depression struck my friend, he thought, “I’m a worthless human. What have I done with my life? I make myself and all the people around me miserable. Why go on?”

I thought, “Bad acid!”

I immediately knew-from extensive practice of introducing wrong chemicals into my brain-that wrong chemicals were in my brain. I went to a doctor. We fiddled around with drugs, just like I always used to, except legally. We found something that worked. I have the right chemicals in my brain. And I feel great.

My square friend, on the other hand, he… Well, to tell the truth he did exactly the same thing I did. He’s got the right chemicals in his brain too, and he feels great. But there’s a key difference between sandals-and-pot era me and white-bucks-and-beer era him.

He keeps asking his doctor when he can get off his meds. I keep asking if I can get more.

This week I’m lifting a few noteworthy articles about 1968 from the British press.

The second one is this gem by Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times:

“It took business about 20 years to work out that the 1960s had happened at all…

1968 happened in offices around about 1988, and in 2008 the ideas of the 1960s are still affecting the ways we behave and think at work.

In the early 1960s a group of radical American students got together and drew up a blueprint for what they thought the world ought to look like.

The celebrated Port Huron Statement called for work that was ‘educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence… a willingness to accept social responsibility.’

As Anthony Dworkin pointed out in the current issue of Prospect magazine, these ideas have now become enshrined in the workplace ideal that business schools preach.

Empowerment, creativity, team-work, lifelong learning, values and visions: all these ideas had their roots in the 1960s.

Students got over it. Business never has.

Some of these ideas have turned into a good thing in workplaces, others less so.

The business equivalent of free love is job hopping, which means that employees can get into bed with any old employer and if it doesn’t work out they can dump them and move on.

In moderation this is good; in excess it is expensive for employers and destabilising for employees.

The idea of instant, and constant, gratification was also a big thing in the 1960s, but is not so good when translated to work.

Jobs are often dull, and so if we expect the earth to move for us every time, we end up feeling cheated and disappointed when it doesn’t.

Above all what characterised the 1960s was people pretending to be cool when they were actually quite square.

‘Far out, man,’ and ‘be free,’ they used to say.

The same now applies to most corporate executives.

They speak a language infected with the spirit of the 1960s because they think it sounds good, not because they really mean it.

My favourite example was the JP Morgan manager who instructed investment bankers to “take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them”.

Peace and love proved a dodgy dictum even when applied to students. When applied to bankers it beggars belief…

“Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields,” sang the Beatles. “Nothing is real, nothing to get hung about.”

But that is just the trouble and that is why the spirit of the 1960s jars at work. In business it is real, and there is much to get hung about.”

The press in Britain, just like in France, is awash with comments about the legacy of 1968.

Over the coming days I mention a few that have caught my attention.

The first is by the economist Paul Ormerod, and published in Prospect Magazine:

“I observed the events of May 1968 from my council estate in Rochdale. They seemed to have no relevance to us.

We saw on our television screens self-indulgent children of the bourgeoisie calling for the overthrow of the system.

This system had brought a modicum of prosperity and security to a population with memories of both the grim inter-war years and the pride and sacrifice of the war itself.

These feelings of bewilderment were enhanced when I arrived at Cambridge later that year.

Public schoolboys, with glittering careers awaiting in finance, the media and the law, occupied buildings and pontificated about revolution.

It was hard to treat it seriously, as anything other than some live street version of Footlights. These people were surely not for real. I was wrong.

The passage of the 1968 generation through the body politic has had devastating consequences not just for the working class but for society as a whole.

Not that I am invoking a mythical golden age. Things needed to change; that was why we supported Labour.

Class divisions were wide, complacency was rife, patriarchy and sexism deeply embedded.

But things were getting better, economically and socially, under the banner of the social democratic compromise all parties had embraced.

The distinguishing feature of the 68ers has continued to be their capacity for self-indulgence, and their blindness about the consequences of their actions for others.

The systematic denigration of western culture by the 68ers has impoverished the lives of millions.

The concept of a high culture had once been embraced without question by generations of working-class activists.

The generation that won the Second World War knew Shakespeare and Beethoven.

They aspired to an idea of progress that would allow their children to access high culture as readily as the bourgeoisie.

So too with the idea of history. The 68er interpretation of British history is a relentlessly negative one.

No country’s history is perfect, but we can be proud of much of our legacy, from defeating European dictators to abolishing slavery.

Children with no sense of history are deprived of their inheritance as citizens.

And the family? The proposition that the conventional nuclear family is on average the best structure in which to bring up children has one of the firmest empirical backings in the whole of social science.

Yet this has been blithely ignored. The result has been the virtual destruction of the conventional family among the poor, with resulting increases in their social and economic degradation.

Multiculturalism is in partial retreat, though the spirit of ‘68 is hard to eradicate.

During the past decade, Britain has experienced one of the greatest movements of population in Europe since the collapse of the Roman empire.

Yet we are invited to believe that this has no adverse effects on our sense of well-being and cohesion. Again, it is the poor who bear the brunt of the dislocations this policy creates.

Those middle-class students who took to the streets in 1968 sought to make common cause with the oppressed.

Yet the impact of their posturings has been to reduce social mobility and to trap people in lives devoid of cultural nourishment.”

Le Monde hails Sarkozy’s “liberal (i.e. pro-market) clarification”.

According to the paper, the French president will be much more forceful and coherent in reforming the economy his second year in office than he was in his first.

Le Monde praises the centerpiece of his new program, the “law on economic modernisation”, saying it marks a “resolute acceptance of supply side policy.”

Would that it was true. I too support the bill, which aims to encourage an entrepreneurial society by cutting red tape, strengthening competition, and generally putting consumers first.

But I doubt that the move will deliver the “rupture” that Sarkozy once promised – for two main reasons.

The first is that he may already have blown his chances. During his first six months in office, Sarkozy wasted a strong popular mandate for change and huge majority.

He implemented some reforms but balked at radical measures such as scrapping the 35-hour week, and shied away from confrontation with vested interest.

I can’t see how he can re-invent himself as an effective modernizer after running out of political capital.

But the more fundamental reason to be skeptical is that Sarkozy is not a conviction politician in the mould of Reagan or Thatcher.

He is only a lukewarm reformer. The Economist hit the nail on the head when it wrote recently:

“For at the heart of Sarkonomics is a contradiction: Mr Sarkozy promises both to create an entrepreneurial, risk-taking society and to protect workers, factories and jobs.

When he was running for president, his campaign stop of preference was the factory floor, where he would surround himself with industrious-looking men in hard hats and promise never to let France lose its factories, because, “Once the factories go, everything goes.”

He may call himself a liberal but he also believes in national champions, and in a strong industrial policy to defend them.”

“You cannot bring prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further brotherhood of men by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, 1916

(PS: this quote is sometimes wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln.)

When it comes to economic policy, I am impressed by none of the candidates for the US presidency.

But on energy, their proposals are downright idiotic.

With gas prices rising all the time, John McCain is calling for a moratorium on the 18.4-cent federal gas tax.

This is a misguided solution to a non-existent problem.

The rise in US gas prices is relative: Europeans would love to pay only $4 a gallon. And then is it such a bad thing?

With everyone, from Bush to environmentalists, rightly complaining that America is “addicted to oil”, lower demand should be welcome.

And McCain wants to spur consumption through lower prices…

Barack Obama, for his part, wants a new tax on the ill-gotten profits of those nasty oil companies.

This idea is even sillier than McCain’s. As the Wall Street Journal wrote recently:

“You may… be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics.

We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%.

Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says “costs America $800 million a day.” Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law.

The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.”

The Walll Street Journal also notes that the energy industry’s earnings are not as outrageous as people think.

Profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8% – and this was a boom year for oil.

An analysis by the Cato Institute found that between 1970 and 2003, the oil and gas business was “less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy.”

As the journal writes: “These are hardly robber barons.”

Desparing to make any sense of the frontrunners’ energy programs, I turned to Hillary Clinton – who claims executive experience a pragmatic approach.

And it turns out she wants both a McCain’s style gas-tax moratorium and and Obama-style windfall tax on companies.

Far from repudiating her rivals’ follies, she compounds them.

How can such smart people trained at the best schools in the world (well, for Clinton and Obama, at least) come up with such dumb ideas?

The answer, of course, is that they want to get elected.

The idiocy of their proposals betrays not so much their own as their constituents’ ignorance.

I see this as another vindication of Bryan Caplan’s theory of “voter irrationality”.

The Wall Street Journal piece quoted is here. I recommend Caplan’s brilliant website.