Take notice of what passes for utopia in France, young socialists.
Paris is burning as the Yellow Vests hold France and its leader, Macron, accountable for the imposition of a fuel tax.
As Paris burns, Macron, feasts on pheasant at Versailles.
Yet why should this be?
Why should the French people be so angry?
It isn’t as if the country and its people are living the through the plague.
They are not Fantine from Les Miserables.
No, the French have it pretty good.
Actually they enjoy benefits out the derrière.
They have national health care in which everyone is covered, good pension plans, guaranteed vacation and sick days that would make Americans drool, and a 35 hour work week.
Not bad.
Sure, the unemployment rate is 9 to 10 per cent, but that is hardly staggering.
France has had these levels of unemployment before without riots.
So why now?
Economists, true to form, have stepped up their eco-babble; they mumble incoherently about dual labor markets whereby many citizens can not get jobs in the first place because of the difficulty in firing an employee once hired. Thus employers are unwilling to hire.
With growth rates in the economy low, it seems unlikely that employers will step up their hiring.
Demand, as elsewhere in the world, seems to be low in France. In other words people have less money to buy things.
Duh, I wonder why. Could it be because the stupid leadership of the world put everyone under austerity to pay for the mistakes of the dumbasses who led them?
In France this problem is more acute because France extracts so much money in taxes to pay for social services.
But this is not new in France. The government has long extracted money from the people to do things for people.
And therein lies the problem: the people must wait for the government to do things for them rather than they doing it for themselves.
And so what has arisen in France over generations is increasing helplessness which would not have arisen had the leaders acted responsibly.
But, of course, they didn’t.
What changed in the world in 2007 was that the leaders of the world made their unprecedented charge to hog the wealth of the world. They gave themselves bailouts instead of jail time.
The leaders helped themselves out at the expense of the people.
Moreover the leaders who created this economic catastrophe did nothing for the people.
This did not go unnoticed by the peoples of the world.
In France, the leaders not only enriched themselves they added insult to injury by adding a fuel tax.
Thus the riots.
It’s not the money.
It’s the disrespect that the leaders show their citizens.
Citizens want to be respected. They want to have a say in their own affairs. They want their leaders to listen to them.
People need to contribute as surely as they need to breathe.
Any system that fails to recognize this – and this applies particularly to top-down driven socialist “democracies” – will feel the wrath of the people.
France is no different.
One day Parisian mobs – are there any other kind – will again parade their leaders through the streets in a wooden cart on their way to a thirsty guillotine.
It’s their national sport.
The leaders will cry out, “How did I offend thee, loyal subjects? My heart will always lie with France.”
The citizens, from their earthen hovels, will silently point to Versailles.
Cowboy Archer 