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French Fried by
the Welfare State
(How is it
possible for a heat wave to wipe out 15,000 people in a modern
nation--a nation that takes great pride in having fashioned one of the
world's most extensive welfare "safety nets"? )
By
Lawrence W. Reed
"Heat Wave Toll Nearly 15,000" blared a recent headline. Must be some
far-off, little-known, God-forsaken corner of the planet nobody ever
heard of, I figured. Nope. It was France.
Consider the enormity of what happened in August. When the sun came out
and the temperatures rose to something below what El Paso endures for
four months of every year, a staggering 14,802 mostly elderly people in
France died. The proportional equivalent in the United States, where a
hundred deaths from heat would provoke a congressional inquiry, would be
72,000. That's a population the size of the city of Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania.
How is it possible for a heat wave to wipe out 15,000 people in a modern
nation--a nation that takes great pride in having fashioned one of the
world's most extensive welfare "safety nets"?
When the Soviets blamed endless food shortages on 75 years of bad
weather, honest people knew otherwise. Marx and Lenin were the culprits,
not Mother Nature. Communism and famine are virtual synonyms. France now offers
us proof that death and the welfare state can mean the same thing
too. Indeed, perhaps the welfare state was so named because in reality,
the bureaucracy does well while the rest of society pays the fare.
France has a costly network of publicly funded benefits that begin
flowing from the bosom of the national nanny at birth. When a woman has
her first child, she gets a check. Each successive child generates an
increase in her monthly allowance, courtesy of the taxpayers. When the
child retires six decades and a plethora of other handouts later, he
gets a generous state pension. The message each French citizen gets for
a lifetime is that government is there to take care of him. Human needs?
That's the assignment of some department somewhere in Paris. So when
thousands of elderly were roasting in August, their friends and
relatives took a vacation. Why should they assume a responsibility that
the state has assumed for them?
A hundred years ago the French economist, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, wrote
that taxes above 12 percent of national income would be "exorbitant" and
destructive. Today, the French welfare state extracts around 45 percent
of the nation's GDP. After Paris bludgeons its subjects with one of the
highest per-capita tax bills in Europe, there's not much left for
ordinary people to take care of their elderly even if they wanted to.
Americans have erected a welfare state as well, but not one so far along
that our penchant for rugged individualism, personal responsibility, and
strong families has vanished. Many Europeans see us as heartless and
uncaring because we don't expect Uncle Sam to coddle us from cradle to grave.
But because we still largely take care of ourselves and of those around us, we
don't drop dead by the tens of thousands when the
temperature goes up.
If the French really want to learn from their awful experience this
summer, they don't need another government commission. They should take
heed of one of their own, albeit a Frenchman of long ago. When social
commentator Alexis de Tocqueville visited a young, bustling America in
the 1830s, he cited the vibrancy of civil society as one of this
country's greatest assets. He was amazed that Americans were constantly
forming "associations" to advance the arts, build libraries and
hospitals, and meet social needs of every kind. If something good needed
to be done, it rarely occurred to our forebears to expect politicians
and bureaucrats, who were distant in both space and spirit, to do it for
them. "Amongst the laws which rule human nature," wrote Tocqueville in
Democracy in America, "there is none which seems to be more precise and
clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized, or to become more
so, the art of associating together must grow and improve..."
More recently, Americans have been lectured to by certain haughty,
self-righteous French about one thing or another, and usually in
condescending tones. Well, when 15,000 of their countrymen are abandoned
and drop dead from a little heat, it's time the sanctimonious ones (not
to be confused with the many citizens of France who are perfectly fine
and friendly folks) sit back and listen to a lecture themselves.
How can France revive the attitudes and institutions that form the
foundation of a strong civil society--a society composed of children who
eventually do grow up to be independent, self-respecting adults?
Certainly, the French can never do so by blindly embracing government
programs that crowd out private initiatives or by impugning the motives
of those who raise legitimate questions about those government programs.
They cannot restore civil society if they have no confidence in
themselves and believe that government has a monopoly on compassion.
They'll never get there if they overtax people's earnings and then, like
children who never learned their arithmetic, complain that people can't
afford to meet certain needs.
For all people interested in the advancement and enrichment of culture,
these are crucial observations with far-reaching implications. The
French are high on "culture" but cultural progress should not be defined
as taking more and more of what other people have earned and spending it
on "good" things through a government bureaucracy. Genuine cultural
progress occurs when individuals solve problems without resorting to
politicians or the police and bureaucrats they employ.
The French can advance civil society only when they get serious about
replacing government programs with private initiative, when discussion
gets beyond such infantile reasoning as, "If you want to cut government
subsidies, you must be in favor of starving the elderly." Civil society
in France will blossom when the French come to understand that "hiring"
the expensive middleman of government is not the best way to "do good,"
that it often breaks the connection between people in need and caring
people who want to help. They'll make progress when the "government is
the answer" cure is recognized for what it is--false charity, a copout,
and a simplistic non-answer that doesn't get the job done well, even
though it makes its advocates smug with self-righteous satisfaction.
What happened in France this summer should be laid squarely at the
doorstep of the French welfare state and its horrid social pathologies.
The wisdom of Henry David Thoreau comes to mind: "If I knew for certain
that a man was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my
life."
# # #
Lawrence W. Reed, born and raised in Beaver Falls, is president of the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute
in Midland, Michigan. Justin Marshall, a Mackinac Center colleague,
assisted in the preparation of this commentary. Reprinted with
permission by The Commonwealth Foundation. For more information, visit
www.CommonwealthFoundation.org.
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