The French offer more evidence of their active choice to deny the laws of economics — specifically the impact of the government-mandated minimum wage — as documented in the latest Newsweek.
When François Hollande pushed ahead with plans to raise the national minimum wage, he braced himself for a backlash from the right, always at the ready with accusations of wastefulness in a time of austerity. To his immense chagrin, however, the French president drew the most flak from his own side, the socialist left, with trade unions and workers’ syndicates scorning the 2 percent rise (amounting to nearly €22 a month) as much too miserly. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left politician who won 10 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in April, reacted with undisguised derision. “This is a candy bar,” he said. “You can’t even buy a baguette every day, maybe two in a week. You can buy yourself a cup of coffee per week.”
