Education and healthcare are free in France. The trains are fast, ubiquitous and punctual, and lovely. Baguettes fresh out of the oven cost a dollar. Good wine is inexpensive, and even more ubiquitous than trains. In Paris, every corner has a bookstore.
What’s wrong with that picture?
It’s a goddamned socialist country, that’s what’s wrong!
Well, true enough. France is socialist, at least compared to the United States. It’s not socialist in the old meaning of that term—a top-down planned economy—but those that are are autocracies that have, by and large, fallen prey to corruption at the top and poor quality of life at the bottom.
France, though, and a few other countries nearby, seem to have mastered a kind of socialism-light melded with democratic elections. Every time I come here, I begin to wonder if my lifelong allegiance to the fierce capitalism of my country is wrongheaded. The question is this: what are we each gaining as a result of our different approaches, and what is being given up? A useful addendum to the question is: by whom?
The United States is the innovation capital of the world. We owe that to the profit incentives of relatively unfettered capitalism. Social welfare is not really our thing. Carry your own weight, make your own way, that’s our heritage and our moral credo. Government aid to even the poorest among us is a fight to secure, and even taking that aid carries a social stigma. People look at you like you could do better if you tried harder. We judge ourselves that way. There is a lot of shame in our national psyche.
France is not unimaginative or unprosperous, but it doesn’t have the productivity power of the United States. Some say it doesn’t even want that. Someone is always on strike here. It’s the trains now. (Still, I’m riding on a comfortable one as I write this, slipping in between strike days.)
I’m a fervent capitalist. I believe capitalism is the economic model that best harnesses human greed to the yoke of prosperity. I’m also a redistributionist. Not everyone is, or can be, successful in the arena of capitalistic combat, so out of humanity, we need to tend to the wounded warriors, or even those who never had a chance to strap on their armor and pick up a sword.
I think the French probably enjoy making money as much as we do, but perhaps they are less obsessed with money as the final objective of their endeavors. If true, why is that, do you suppose?
Perhaps it is because they have had longer to consider their options. They lived through the Dark Ages, through feudalism and monarchies, and now they have come out into a kind of sunshine of democratic socialism. Really, after millennia of struggle, where they are now must seem like utopia.
The United States, on the other hand, was founded by people who didn’t choose to throw off the yoke of servitude but who ran away from it. We came to our continent, took it away from those who were here before us, spread out so as to not get in each other’s way, and commenced laboring like so many beavers in a big pond. With that personal freedom, and all those natural resources, of course we began to think of ourselves as hearty and self-reliant. It didn’t hurt in nurturing that strict moral code that our rootstock was Puritan.
So we come to this moment in the early twenty-first century, America and France, with perhaps fundamentally different views of who we are and how we got here. We see ourselves as exceptional. The French may see themselves differently; I’m not sure what the right adjective would be: Enduring? Patient? There is certainly plenty of personal and national pride in France, but it seems more directed toward their triumphs over adversity and economic inequality. We in the United States have faced adversity from time to time, but our country has not been overrun by foreign invaders multiple times, or ruled by kings with guillotines.
It’s possible that coming from such different backgrounds, we just have different priorities. For a couple of hundred years, Americans tilled and smelted a rich life from scratch. We seem to be having trouble accepting that we have succeeded. Fear of the next famine or other calamity is deep in our DNA. And if you aren’t part of the group working toward prosperity, we don’t have much time for you.
The French, on the other hand, lived so long in scarcity, both of the basics of existence and personal freedom, that they seem committed to never going back there, individually or in the aggregate. They have structured their society to be a place where all enjoy basic benefits of food, health and education. They don’t seem to want to crawl over each other to get to the top of the income heap. They just want to make a good life for as many as possible.
And so I return to my first question: What’s wrong with that picture?
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