The Assimilation of François Hollande is Complete

We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.

If the French thought their 2012 election of socialist François Hollande over former president Nicolas Sarkozy meant that they would have their Keynes and avoid austerity, they have been proven fatally wrong. Hollande has just announced plans for a €50 billion austerity package, a cut of 4% of France’s GDP. He has promised to cut taxes on businesses by €30 billion, but this will come in the form of the elimination of a requirement that French businesses fund a family welfare program. Based on the IMF’s multiplier estimate for depressed economies (1.5), France will lose 6% in potential GDP growth over the next 3 years under this plan, potentially resulting in a new French recession. Hollande’s argument for this plan betrays a stunning incompetence on economic matters and illustrates that French voters have been played–there was no democratic alternative to Sarkozy in 2012.

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France Goes to War

French President François Hollande has decided that France is going into Mali. The nation of Mali has, in the last year, descended into civil war. The war in Mali has received relatively little mainstream media coverage and many westerners are, to our collective shame, unaware of what has been going on there and the role their own governments have played in creating the war. Today I would like to examine the Malian Civil War, its causes, the present state of affairs, and the ethics of intervening in it.

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Communist in Name Only: China’s Rising Inequality

The official name is the People’s Republic of China, in case you might forget. You’d be forgiven of course–today’s China does not look much like a “people’s” anything. Increasingly socially and economically stratified, China’s one-party system is about the full extent of its communist or socialist leanings. Or at least, so it seems if you believe a new study out from a Chinese university in Chengdu, which puts China’s Gini coefficient at an utterly ridiculous 0.61.

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How Big Government Discovered America

In the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus needed money to make his voyage to the Americas, he approached several heads of state. He came to the John II of Portugal, to the doges of Genoa and Venice, to Henry VIII in England, all of whom declined to fund his grandiose and zany project. Finally, he went to Ferdinand II and Isabella I of Spain. Their ministers, like the ministers in the previous nations, deemed the voyage impractical, too costly, too foolish. A bad investment. All the same, the Spanish monarchs decided to appoint Columbus Admiral of the Seas and dumped a pile of state investment upon him. And so, from the bosom of state largesse, the discovery of America began.

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Misconceptions: “America is Like Greece”

The other day I found myself in conversation with one of my fellow students about whether or not the British government had too large of budget cuts too soon in the economic recovery. I argued that it was fairly self-evident that it had done so, considering the superior economic performance of most nations that had refrained from issuing cuts or embarked on a policy of stimulus. The response he gave me was an interesting one–he argued that the advantages being enjoyed by the stimulus countries were short term, and advised me to look at France, a country that had refrained from austerity and has recently had its credit rating reduced by Moody’s, is seeing stagnant growth rates, and has a host of other problems. I responded that Eurozone countries were in a different kind of economic crisis from countries like Britain and America, and that different rules applied–this was met with scepticism, as if I were trying to weasel my way out of the point. So today I would like to make the broad argument that the economic problems being experienced in non-Euro countries like America, Britain, Japan, and Canada are of a fundamentally different nature from the kind being experienced in France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. So different, in fact, that comparing the former to the latter is intellectually useless.

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