Ronald Reagan has many famous quotes, including “government is the problem” and “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Channeling Reagan’s wisdom, I have repeatedly shared examples of how government makes things worse rather than better.
- America’s dependency-creating welfare state.
- America’s job-destroying unemployment system.
- America’s anti-achievement education monopoly.
- America’s lifespan-reducing regulatory apparatus.
- America’s inflation-creating monetary policy.
- America’s boondoggle-producing infrastructure laws.
If it is any comfort, however, politicians in other nations routinely also make the mistake of thinking (or claiming) that more government can solve problems.
A report in the New York Times by Constant Méheut asks why there is ongoing discontent in French neighborhoods where the government has spent billions of euros.
After the 2005 riots, the French government invested billions of euros to revamp its immigrant suburbs, or banlieues, to try to rid them of run-down social-housing blocks. But the similarity of the recent riots, and what spurred them, almost a generation later has raised questions about whether the efforts to improve conditions in the banlieues have failed. …The reasons for the failure, they say: Change has come too slow, and, perhaps more important, the government programs have done little to address deeper, debilitating issues of poverty… Clichy-sous-Bois embodies the challenges facing France. The city was the center of the 2005 riots and has since become something of a laboratory for the changes promised by various governments. New social housing has sprung up in many neighborhoods. A government-funded cultural center opened in 2018… But when riots broke out across the country after the recent police shooting, Clichy-sous-Bois was hit hard again… A 2018 parliamentary report noted that the successive governments’ efforts to improve life in the suburbs had mostly failed, in part because they did not focus enough on helping residents escape poverty.
The article does not say how many billions were spent, but France has the highest burden of government spending in Europe. Which is saying something.
And it has the biggest welfare state. Along with stifling taxes.
Have those policies worked? Of course not.
Like many European welfare states, France is economically lagging.
It is also a country where poor people get plenty of handouts, but the article reminds us that that government spending to “help” the poor has an unfortunate consequence of trapping them in poverty (a problem that also exists in the United States).
P.S. None of this is a surprise to people who understand economic history.
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Image credit: Gnrc | CC BY-SA 4.0.
