Lack of inspiration today, so I just took a photo of this week's cover of L'Express, which says it all.
I have an old university classmate who is quite far left by American standards, although he would be fairly mainstream left for French-- oddly, he used to be far right in college; I have always thought that people on the extremes politically have much in common. Anyway, on a listserv discussion of the French strikes yesterday, he wrote, "Really, do you think [France would] have a welfare state without the strikes? We've [Americans] got no strikes and no welfare state."
But I thought back to the Dutch, with their long history of taking care of the poor and orphans through city foundations, or the Germans, who had Bismarck impose a welfare state from the top, or British, many of whom had never been as well off as during the war when everything was rationed, so voted for Labor after the war in spite of loving their Churchill. Why are the French so different? Would France really be worse off if they weren't always in the streets?
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