april 7, 2006

Why They're Doomed

In the CBN Newsroom I sometimes exchange news articles through email with colleagues on the topic of the ongoing social, political, economic, and moral meltdown in Western Europe. The subject headings of these e-mails often simply read “Why They’re Doomed,” and everyone knows what the e-mail is about.

It probably sounds insensitive. And any honest newsperson will admit that newsrooms are not usually havens of sensitivity. But in our defense we are talking about the fate of a system, and not expressly about people. I’ve talked to plenty of Europeans who feel like passengers on the Titanic. You can get a taste of the totality of the problems facing the European system by typing the words Hurd and Europe into the search engine here on CBNNews.com.

All this as a preamble to today’s edition of Why They’re Doomed.  Weeks of rioting by young people against a new labor law has paralyzed France and destroyed the political fortunes of Center-Right President Jacques Chirac and his minion, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.  The labor law in question would make it easier for companies to hire and fire people under age 26. Labor reform is badly needed in France and in most of Western Europe, where it is too expensive and risky to hire a worker who might then be impossible to fire.  So these are riots in defense of guaranteed jobs, of welfare, of socialism. And massive strikes like this one will make it very difficult for France to extricate itself from its downward economic spiral.

But that’s not Why They’re Doomed. Well, not completely.  Why They’re Doomed is because of the solution the French seem to have come up with. And that is the anticipated election of a new Socialist president, much father to the left of Jacques Chirac, named  Ségolène Royal.  The magazine Paris Match just did its cover story proclaiming “The Irresistible Ascension” of Madame Royal. Even the New York Times speaks of her “elegant profile and stratospheric poll ratings.”

So, here’s the deal: a nation that has enshrined entitlement and loafing as national virtues, and crippled its economy and mortgaged its future through 50 years of socialism, now needs more socialism in the form of …a Socialist President!

Pretty amazing, isn’t it?