Can Libertarians Support Le Pen?
by Cécile Philippe
I did not vote in the last French presidential elections, first
because I am in the United States, and second because the program of all
the candidates is disgusting to me. France is, after all, the most
socialist country in the Western world. But the second-place finish of
the right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen against President Jacques Chirac,
and the coming run-off between them, is so astonishing that I looked more
carefully at the programs of the two finalists. Here is another surprise.
Despite his protectionist views, Le Pen should also be known for his
libertarian ones.
It is true that Le Pen's program is structured round "national
preference." For example, he defends the protection of the national
market in order to reserve jobs for French people. He proposes to
reestablish commercial frontiers to protect French labor and products.
That measure would be accompanied by the "recapture" of the
interior market and of exports. He also suggests that he would
"restabilize" the relations between big and small enterprises.
He calls himself an anti-globalist. He wants national preference written
in the constitution.
Yet protectionism is first unjust and second inefficient. It is
unjust because it does not respect the property rights of French people,
employers or employees, consumers or producers, who want to import
products or hire foreigners they consider more able to serve to their
needs. The first right of a human being is to control his body, and then
the resources he has homesteaded or exchanged. Consequently, every
exercise of violence against voluntary exchange is an act against liberty
and thus unjust.
Protectionist measures are also inefficient because they hinder the
satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumer. They are
"those measures undertaken by the authority, which directly and
primarily are intended to divert production, in the widest meaning of the
word, including commerce and transportation, from the ways it would take
in the unhampered market." It makes people poorer, which is
particularly obvious in international trade. Restriction on mobility of
products, capital goods, and labor hinders the operation of what Ricardo
called The Law of Comparative Cost, the fact that each country turns
toward those areas of production for which its condition offer
comparatively, although not absolutely, the most favorable
opportunities.
Despite these very negative elements, Le Pen also defends liberty
and justice in some important area. First, he advocates ending-and he is
the only candidate to have done so-the 35-hour law, which is an infamy.
It prohibits laborers from working more than 35 hours per week because
they should "share the work" with those who do not have any
(thanks to other interventions by the welfare state). Nobody can say on a
priori grounds how many hours someone should work. This is something to
be decided in the contract between employee and employer. Besides, this
law is counter-productive on its own terms, since it hinders exchanges
that would otherwise have occurred, while at the same time promoting
other exchanges that would never have taken place in a free market,
exactly because they would not have been efficient.
An even more important point is that Le Pen denounces the Treaty of
Maastricht and the Euro currency. Whereas all the other candidates
(Chirac, Jospin, Madelin…) want to build a "Big Europe," Le Pen
wants to get rid of all the agreements signed in the last years, in order
to get out of the Euro. He also wants to put an end to that "huge
machine of laws," the Commission of Brussels. These would be very
important steps toward liberty. The Euro is a very bad money in the hand
of inflationists, and the Brussels Commission has amazing powers of
property-rights destruction.
Another important point of Le Pen's program concerns taxation.
Taxation is one of the involuntary means that government uses to finance
itself. Every step toward its diminution increases liberty and
efficiency. Le Pen proposes to suppress inheritance, income, and land
taxes, and to lighten the taxation of businesses and financial transfers.
Of course, we have to wonder how he will do that, as he wants to increase
spending on such things as subsidies for children and the munitions
manufacturers. On the other hand, he does criticize US military hegemony.
Finally, Le Pen clearly defends disengagement from the government by
advocating a reduction in public employment and the restoration of free
choice in schooling, and he even comes close to suggesting a free market
in adoptions.
None of these points make Le Pen a consistent defender of liberty,
but for those French libertarians willing to support the lesser of evils,
that is clearly Le Pen as compared to Chirac.
Among the 97 points of Chirac's program, you will hardly find
anything liberal. As he tries to please everybody and not to forget
anybody, you will, of course, find very little emphasis on tax reduction.
But that is nothing as compared to the 90% of his program, which is pure
socialism and demagogy. In favor of an "ecologically responsible and
economically strong" agriculture, Chirac promises to spend more on
the military and the police. He wants to create new interventions in the
job market for young people, a new ministry of ecology, a worldwide
organization for the environment, and subsidies to allow women to keep
their kids at home. He proposes to reform the State, to humanize
globalization, to fight for professional egalitarianism, to put an end to
the ghettos, and to enact a European constitution. Through his 97 points,
Chirac slashes liberties and propagates confusion.
Edward ><+>
If you have fifty problems and one of them is government, you have only one problem.
http://www.global-connector.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/reality_pump/
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