Okay, forty-plus French cities are burning to the chagrin of 18 Francophiles and unhealthy delight of 400 million Francophobics. What does it teach us?
Some say it's the result of uncontrolled immigration. I live in the most powerful country on earth (for good or evil) and it was founded on, and continues to thrive on unlimited immigration. The people threatened by immigrant labor are people being paid more than their labor is worth. What's their labor worth? What they can negotiate in a mutually voluntary employment relationship. Not more, not less. I'm not unaware of the painful elements of having your efforts evaluated by the market. Markets, like weather, are indifferent to individuals.
Private, voluntary charity (imperfect as it is) has always kept a bit of a net under people. With rising prosperity, the 'floor' below which we're not willing to let even the lazy or insane sink, rises, but it's always the bottom. Even in countries able to subsidize their welfare states with the temporary boom of petroleum money have economic strata, culutural, political and economic elites.
And since socialism is a Ponzi scheme at the end of the day (eventually the oil wells dry up and someone figures out how to exploit some other source of energy more cheaply). Petroleum is an alternate fuel: it came on strong when it got hard to find whales. Just as there's no whaling industry anymore, fossil fuels will eventually peter out.
If Cuba had oil, they wouldn't be using ox-carts in Havana in 2005.
What's this got to do with France? There's been lots of nonsense from both liberals and conservatives, religious zelots and anti-religious bigots, about what's 'causing' rioting in France. It's pretty simple: the more socialism you have, the less you have the reality-check of the market. You create a sense, in people, that they are entitled to more of whatever it is they think they want, and at the same time stifle the creation of wealth that allows for expanding employment and something to tax for the sake of the welfare state.
France's problem is not immigration, it is not Islam. As it's been since the French Revolution, it's been France's embrace of socialistic economics. I can't remember who it was who quipped that the French Revolution succeeded in cutting off the heads of everyone refined enough not to shit in their armchairs, but as violent revolutions often do, the result was an illiberal regime (to put it mildly).
The places in the U.S. where there's a 'crisis' of immigration, they're just milder manifestations of the same problem. As long as economic opportunity is to be had by emigrating people will do it (and you're wasting your effort if you try to stop them). As long as that opportunity is the opportunity to find employment or open a business, immigration is great: it takes people from places with too few opportunities and deposits them in places with too few people. If the opportunity is to collect unemployment benefits, then you get France, where as David Sedaris has pointed out, even the unemployed 'go on strike.'
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There's been lots of nonsense from both liberals and conservatives, religious zelots and anti-religious bigots, about what's 'causing' rioting in France.
Is this really getting air-time over there? Fascinating. I guess it’s a ‘out cuntry is so fucked up let’s anal-yze another’. I caught bits of Meet the Press and McClaughlin (funny how the word “laugh” is in his name) Group this past weekend and they weren’t waxing on France, though.
(tangent time: it seems Bush is now in the clear about “misleading” the world in to the Iraq war. How this conclusion came to pass is incomprehensible though. On the morning of September 11, 2001 (sounds familiar?), before the shit hit the fan (or the plane hit the building, so to speak) The Powers That Be had a secret meeting. About what? ‘the problem in Iraq’. Hmmmm.)
And your continued use or implying of bigot when citing those that prefer freedom _from_ religion and who may be just a bit fucking sick of, say, Christianity spreading like a plague *is* a bit ironic.
As long as that opportunity is the opportunity to find employment or open a business, immigration is great:
Indeed. But that is rarely the case for immigration by those that slither off to…less appealing neighborhoods. And then the breed with a seemingly less that 9-month cycle, and some even refuse to learn the language of the country they reside in. And still piss and moan. Look at the video: *this* is the way these people deal with their “problems”.
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