Neoliberal? France would have been since the 1980s. We have all been hearing this refrain for a long time without paying more attention to it than that. With the risk of ending up believing it. It’s too bad.
A policy aimed at rejecting the welfare state in favor of a market left to itself, that is to say removed from (legal) regulations and (economic) interventions, must be regarded as neoliberal (or even ultra-liberal). of the community. Are we there? Truly not.
It would be better not to forget that France is in the leading group of countries that redistribute their national wealth. It devotes more than half of its own to “public expenditure”, ie a little less than 1,500 billion euros. Retirees ? François Bayrou highlighted these days that, to cover the 345 billion that they ask for every year, the State contributes 120 billion: 90 billion to compensate for the cost of its own social policy guidelines (relief in charges, departures anticipated, etc.) and 30 billion to restore the balance of the system. 30 billion is more than three times the annual justice budget. As a system self-financed on the basis of social contributions alone, we have already seen better. And this is just one example. The fact is that France is one of the countries in which the social shock absorbers have long been the most flexible. In 2020, we spent 872 billion euros on our social protection, of which 46 (“only”) were closely linked to the health crisis when it was at its strongest.
Electricity? Its regulated tariff is designed not to reflect market variations, upwards or downwards. But finally, these days, the kilowatt hour at the outlet – which remains at €0.1740 for the basic tariff – is 2.5 times cheaper than on the wholesale market. At the end of August, it was 4.3 times less. In the register of the abandonment of consumers to a pure logic of commercial profit, we have already seen more convincing. As for gasoline at the pump, it is no mystery that the state is working to keep it affordable.
But what happens to the free fox in the free henhouse, since it seems that such is the situation of private companies in the deregulated market that would offer itself to their appetite? Quite honestly, I know of few bigger carabistouilles. We live in a legally saturated world. The methods of regulating economic life have changed, but the global pressure has never ceased to increase. Take the so-called independent authorities, to whom “regulation” was specifically entrusted to make it more scholarly, more technical and above all less exposed to the suspicion of political bias that weighed on “classic” ministerial administrations. Today there are 24, whose scope of action covers everything conceivable in economic life: competition, financial markets, roads and railways, audiovisual communications, telephony, medicines and health products, energy, games, nuclear safety, administrative documents, IT, etc. They have at their disposal intrusive means of control, immense powers of sanction and, henceforth, great latitude to set themselves the “guidelines” of their action… As for the “pure” general normative constraint – that of the laws and regulations – it has never been so dense. We legislate with all our might, and for a long time, to “protect” everything and everyone against the “excesses” of the market: the environment, the consumer, the worker, “economic public order”, the balance of contractual relations, ethics, transparency and human rights, “sovereignty”. I pass.
The idea that there may exist today, somewhere in France, an uncontrolled economic activity, durably removed from legal control and freed from all supervision, is a bad joke. We have never been “neoliberal” and we are even less and less so. This is neither good nor bad – especially since, in this area, the only possible virtue lies in the intelligence of the dosage. It is only a fact, to which it would be useful and honest to accord the language of each other. History not (too much) to pass the bladders for lanterns.
