American Advantage

From IBD:

Employment: While French youths are rioting over a proposal that would actually help them get work, U.S. college graduates are about to enter a hot job market. Could it be that the French system is a failure? An anti-market, welfare state has not served France - or any other nation for that matter - well. As we noted on this page Tuesday, the French economy has grown a paltry 1.6% a year since 2001.

That's stagnation.

Economic output in France, as well as Germany and Italy, has fallen far behind that of the U.S. across the last two decades. Since the end of World War II, a soft, cradle-to-grave socialism has been nurtured across Europe while American capitalism has been dismissed as antiquated and just plain mean. Its cruel vagaries had no place in the enlightened parlors and rule-making halls of modern, bureaucratic Europe. Being unencumbered by the grip of cold, unfeeling capitalism, the French have been able fabricate rights, among them the lifetime right to a job.

As a result, firing incompetents and underperformers in France is nearly impossible. That restriction, of course, puts French companies at a disadvantage. Their incentive to hire is undercut because they know that if they hire the wrong person, they cannot fire him or her and replace that worker with someone better. So rather than take a chance at being stuck with a poor worker, they don't hire at all. The inevitable effect of a private sector that can't meet its employment needs is an economy that is chained to the deck.

Consequently, the jobless rate in France is 10%, more than twice as high as America's 4.8%. It's even higher among workers younger than 26, an unbelievable 23%. In the industrial suburbs of Paris and other cities, filled with disaffected Muslim youths, joblessness soars to 50% or more. Give credit to French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin for proposing a change in the law that would let employers fire workers who are younger than 26 without reason during the first two years of their employment. That would break the logjam and give employers an incentive to hire the young.

But there's a bellowing - and perhaps spoiled - core of young people in France, hundreds of thousands of them, who refuse to see the economic sense of the proposal. Their response has been to riot in protest of the very thing that will help them.

Meanwhile, 1.4 million U.S. college graduates have their minds on things other than tantrums. American students will be competing for spots in the best job market since 2001 when they finish school in the coming weeks, according to job consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas. American companies are planning to hire about 15% more new college graduates than they did last year.

Why the big difference? The U.S. system is based on the realities of economics, not the delusions of socialist policymakers who dream up nonexistent rights and believe that labor and risk should not be required to achieve comfort and security.