Montreal, February 15, 2005 • No 151

  

OPINION

 

Mathieu Laine is lecturer at the University of Paris II and director of the Institut Turgot.
 
 

NANNY DIARIES *
 

by Mathieu Laine

 

          Slowly, with almost no one noticing, France is sinking into the "mild, regular and peaceful" tyranny that Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw with remarkable lucidity. It took no more than a few years for the fight against tobacco, obesity and other personal vices to come to the fore in politics and the media. President Jacques Chirac vows to be the great defender of the weak and the pioneer of a vast government drive to make the life of the French ever better.
 

          A safe, normal life! That is the new political El Dorado that the government promises us. A life rid of every kind of risk, in which "Big Mother," in Michel Schneider's phrase, takes care of everything, protects and reassures us, comforts us when we are sad and sings us lullabies when we have insomnia. In this paradise of nice feelings, an Empire of the Good in which the capacity for individual choices is dwindling, the collective benevolence of the state and of individual irresponsibility reign supreme.

          The nanny state, French-style, is everywhere. No longer surprising are the taxpayer-funded ads on prime-time television from the Minister of Health advising citizens how to put their things away in order to avoid a bad fall, or reminders to put their glasses on to reduce the risk of household accidents. The same ministry, together with the Marxist trade union CGT-Transports, also posted posters in the Paris Metro, touting the health benefits of climbing up and down stairs.

          A French senator recently put forward a draft bill to create a National Prevention Agency against the "epidemic" of obesity – as if getting fat were a communicable disease – to be paid for by a new tax on junk food. You should also expect official warnings to be placed on chocolate bars a few months from now, as is already the case with cigarette packs, to the effect that "An excess of sugar makes you fat!" or "Chocolate is bad for your health!" No one in power dares point out that people don't choose to be sick, but choose to take risks. That's their right, and the consequence of their choices should be respected.

          President Chirac earlier this month took the "Tyranny of the Good" another step forward, pushing a law to ensure equal pay for equal work for men and women in less than five years. Mr. Chirac is not afraid to use all possible moralist arguments to interfere with private contracts. But what about the individual's right to negotiate their own wage? Of course, in this case, Mr. Chirac has only short-term political gain – and the female vote – in mind.
 

"The nanny state, French-style, is everywhere. No longer surprising are the taxpayer-funded ads on prime-time television from the Minister of Health advising citizens how to put their things away in order to avoid a bad fall, or reminders to put their glasses on to reduce the risk of household accidents."


          The French constitution includes the "precautionary principle," supposed to guide human activities to prevent harm to the environment and to human health. It has to be denounced for defending slower innovation, technological stagnation and institutional apathy is also extremely risky. These risks compete with one another, fear of the unknown versus fear of the known.

          Never have the requirements of "public health" and "collective welfare" been more prevalent, and politicians never stop citing them to encroach ever further into our own spheres of decision-making. Unfortunately, while government arbitrariness is the hallmark of the worst of tyrannies, a majority of Frenchmen do not perceive the extensive dangers looming. They even ask for more protection. As the great Tocqueville also predicted, "a great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large."

          Much weakened by the economic crisis, the French state succeeds in stirring fears and inventing new missions to rationalize its existence. But this drift must be stemmed while there is still time. For, behind that flow of prescriptions and regulations, behind that supposedly nice striving to change man and make him healthier, if necessary against his will, the totalitarian monster against which so many men and women have fought in the history of our country is inevitably lurking. More than ever, in the economic, cultural and even moral fields, France needs to recover its free-market values as they have definitely been ill-treated since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, Frιdιric Bastiat and Jean-Baptiste Say.

 

* This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal Europe, on January 21, 2005.
 

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