The European Tri-fecta!

In France, the young people are still rioting. It’s not March Madness. It’s just everyday insanity. They are protesting a new law that would make it easier for employers to hire and fire people below 26 during a two-year trial period. You’d think this would be welcome news to the slackers: youth unemployment in France is over 20%.

In the States, however, where almost everyone can be hired and fired (unless you’re a member of the New York teachers’ union), the 2006 crop of US college graduates is facing the best job market since 2001.

“Business, computer, engineering, education and health care grads in highest demand,” writes a Reuters correspondent. Here in Baltimore, there are help wanted notices in shop windows, on business signs, on billboards, even jingles on the radio.

“We are approaching full employment ,” said the chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
In fact, competition for young workers is heating up. Employers have to compete on salaries, perks and benefits.

Writes the blogmeister of moonbattery.com:
“You don’t have to be Adam Smith to notice that there is an inverse relationship between the health of an economy and the degree of government interference. A demented state of affairs in which private businesses are not allowed to fire employees goes a long way toward explaining why the jobless rate of French youth is 23% nationwide, and 50% among the poor.”

“Anglo-Saxon” Adam Smith, however, may have a difficult stand against the institutionalized statism bred by generations of Marxists and neo-socialists who have used the past half century to turn large layers of French and European society into passive dependents on state largesse.

It reminds me of some fellow students I met at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland back in the 1980’s, who were planning to “go on the dole” for a few years after their graduation. This way, the young Scots would be getting paid by the state for doing nothing, could do anything they wanted - and still feel like victims of “the system,” the English AND Maggy Thatcher.

That’s called the European Trifecta!

J. Christoph Amberger
Executive Publisher and The Taipan Group’s 247profits e-Dispatch Team