The latest budget is not just forcing people to work directly for the state. The country’s largest companies are being made to pay a “temporary surcharge” to help fix the mess, with companies such as LMVH estimating it will cost them €800m a year, and Vinci €40m, even though it is hard to understand why their global shareholders need to bail out the French government.
The “rich”, defined as anyone earning more than €250,000 a year, will pay another surcharge, angering many of the bankers who President Emanuel Macron persuaded to move from London to Paris after Brexit. If those tax rises don’t bring the deficit back under control – and they probably won’t, given that the economy has now ground to a halt – there will probably very soon be a “work for the state” week, and then a month. Once it has started, it will be hard to stop.
In reality, the real problem is this. France is not an exception, it has just travelled further down the road than the rest of us. The grim reality is that we are all heading in the same direction.
Here in the UK, the plans of the Labour Government will take state spending up to 44pc of GDP, with taxes to match. That is almost certainly an underestimate given that growth is likely to be non-existent, and an ageing population, an epidemic of worklessness, and a flood of refugees will all combine to drive spending relentlessly higher.
And that’s even before the Government squanders billions on expensive white elephants such as GB Energy and the National Wealth Fund. In the UK, we will probably call it a “work for the NHS” day, with our entire salary donated to the health system. The outcome will be much the same. We will all end up working for the Government.
Hayek would have recognised what was happening. In his classic 1944 book The Road To Serfdom he described how welfare states would evolve over time. They might start with the creation of a safety net, but they would grow relentlessly as more and more entitlements were taken for granted.
It has taken 80 years, but it is hard to think of any word other than serfdom that better summarises being forced to work for the state a day a year, much as mediaeval peasants were forced to work for their lords for a set part of every month.
The blunt truth is this. If we don’t change direction soon, we will all end up working for the government as the French soon will – and we will have lost the right to control our own lives.