Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
- Joined
- October 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
What do you call an economy that darn near guarantees employment for life?
The unemployment rate in France is 7.40%.
There's certainly no merit-based hire/fire dynamic to churn your labor pool and demand that they progress. I would think a free market would include competition in the labor sector.
That's not true. The French labor market *is* very heavy, and it *is* more difficult to fire employees than in most other countries, but that doesn't mean it's not happening at all, or even that it's happening orders of magnitude less than in comparable economies.
Once again, you're taking a difference in degree and making it look like a difference in quality -- in the USSR, for example, you really *did* have guaranteed employment for life, regardless of merit.
N.b.: I don't think the French system is a particularly successful one; IMO the Danish/Scandinavian one strikes a much better balance between worker security and market flexibility. But if you genuinely believe that you can go to France, march to the Big Government Employment Office, and they'll give you a 35-hour-a-week, 7-week-paid-vacation job for life regardless of what you do while on the job, you're so badly mistaken that it's borderline delusional.
It's the same sort of argument--while they both fit under broad umbrellas such as "advanced capitalist economies", that in no way forces them to be considered equivalent.
It all depends on your point of view, padawan. If we look at things globally, including countries like China, North Korea, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Brazil in our comparison, then they most certainly should be put in the same basket. But if we narrow our focus to include only advanced capitalist countries, then obviously differences are going to emerge.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540