More fair and balanced reporting on the French protests

Craig Smith again. Maybe he wasn't listening to me yesterday.

If the law is significantly weakened, it will serve a serious blow to the prime minister, who hopes to run for president next year. It will also mark another defeat in France's long-running struggle to break the stranglehold of its rigid social-welfare system, which has kept economic growth sluggish and unemployment high for decades.
...
France has a strong tradition of often violent demonstrations and paralyzing strikes that is largely tolerated by the broader population, which has a cultural mistrust of government dating back to the French Revolution even as it retains a deep sense of dependency on the state.

The resulting tendency to rebel against any attempt to curtail entitlements has cowed many administrations into backing down from bold policies that might have helped remake the system in the past.

This is actually by far the worst--and most revealing--so far of these editorial judgments smuggled into news stories. It bespeaks an absolute belief in Friedrich von Hayek's economic theories, one not uncommon among today's reporters, and certainly not among Thatcher fetishists. If this judgment were the consensus opinion of serious economists studying France I'd love to hear it, but I don't really want to know what Craig Smith thinks.

If I may steal from a commenter at Steve Gilliard's News Blog:

"Is French unemployment higher than US unemployment? Again, yes."

Only very slightly. Because of America's extremely high levels of incarceration, much higher use of temp and contract labor in the US and the US's intentional use of a very narrow definition of unemployment, the headline US unemployment numbers are actually skewed down by about 2%. The actual consistent American rate is 7-8%, which is admittedly still less than France's consistent 10%, but it's not the US 5% versus France 10% that we always hear about.

Meanwhile, as another commenter points out, "the payoff is universal health care and secure pension plans." A third offers:

They did the same in Spain when I was living there. New laws allowing the companies to hire and fire almost at will with no cost, reducing coverage for unemployment etc... What happened was a total destruction of the work force. People being hired on monday and fired on friday, if you want holidays... fired for 15 days. The result is a majority of young people that still live with their parents well into the 20's or even the 30's because they can't commit to a 12 month lease on an apartment and even less to buy a house.

It's also notable that, if you look at the last line of today's Times article:

Ariane Bernard and Maia de la Baume contributed reporting for this article from Paris.

Which means Craig isn't actually over there himself. I would bet any amount that he has not himself talked to any of the new law's opponents.

I am not an economist. I am not even remotely qualified to judge what kind of employment law would work best for France. But I do know slanted coverage when I see it, and the Times is really outdoing itself here.

Tags:news and politics,politics,France, protests, Villepin, journalism