Welfare In Paris

WE DON’T OFTEN get to read about the details of the welfare state in Old Europe due to the language barrier. We Americans do not know French and German, and we should. But here’s a story from Sylvain Charat about the poverty trap in France.

Yes, in France as elsewhere, it doesn’t pay for a woman to get off welfare because she loses as much in benefits as she gains in income from work. So there are about half a million people (although nobody knows exactly how many) who stay home from work and get the RMI (revenu minimum d’insertion).

The French social model creates poverty. It transformed a system that was supposed to be temporary into a permanent one. Willing to work, most people are thus forced into behavioral poverty, since they are better off staying home.

And as we know, lengthy periods of unemployment are very harmful because people rapidly lose job skills when they are out of the workforce.

Sooner or later, the French are going to have to suck it in and copy the cowboy Americans. They will have to put a limit on welfare, just like we did in the United States. But we’ll be nice about it. We’ll just pretend we didn’t notice.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
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Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

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Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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