From Pater Tenebrarum at acting-man.com:
Everything’s an Emergency
If memory serves, France remains in a state of emergency on account of the terror attack in Paris in last November. As terrible as terror attacks are, they are a statistically insignificant cause of death and injury in developed nations. It is also worth noting that the countries that seem most prone to suffering terror attacks are the ones that are most active in intervening militarily in foreign countries. This is probably no coincidence. Just saying.
We also imagine that a state of emergency is a costly exercise (France’s government immediately exempted itself from meeting the Maastricht deficit target in the wake of the attack, so we can conclude this by inference). Moreover, the recurrence of such attacks shows that ubiquitous snooping on everybody’s digital communications is a wasted effort, if the goal is indeed to keep such attacks from happening (which is doubtful, but that is a topic for another day).
France is in fact one of the world’s top snoopers, but appears to have ignored information and warnings from Turkey’s secret service – information which reportedly was obtained by traditional investigative means and turned out to be correct.
Now there is another emergency, this time an economic one. Mr. Hollande (a.k.a. “the welfare state incarnate”, h/t Gaspard Koenig) has just declared that his government will pull out all stops in terms of labor market intervention, so as finally stop the inexorable rise in French unemployment. His main motive seems to be saving his own job, as Mish notes.
Apparently Hollande made a vague promise that he would step down if unemployment failed to decline this year. Given the persistence of the trend and the inability and/or unwillingness of France’s government to institute meaningful reform, it seemed a slam dunk that it would keep failing to do so.
France’s unemployment rate. If this were a stock, we’d be inclined to buy it on technical grounds
Back when Mr. Hollande’s approval rating fell to the reciprocal of Mr. Putin’s (namely 13%), we briefly gave him the benefit of the doubt, on account of the fact that he evidently had nothing to lose (see “Mission Impossible?”). Nothing much has happened since then – what has happened, was essentially of the too little too late variety.
To continue reading: Hollande’s Socialist Wonderland
