France, the birth-place of socialism, is now living socialism's logical end-game.

Mobs in the streets of France, led by university students, are smashing store-fronts, burning automobiles, barricading streets, and their labor union buddies are threatening a syndicalist general strike.

The occasion for this fulmination is the proposed enactment of a first-job contract law that would permit businesses to fire a worker under the age of 25 for any reason during his first two years of employment.

These reactions are idiotic.  Students are rioting against legal action to make it easier for them to get jobs, a process with limited prospects of success today.

Unemployment overall is somewhere well north of 10% and nearly 25% among people under age 25. 

The reason for this is, in short, socialism.

More specifically, the problem is similar to what labor unions working with welfare-state government have created in the United States.  Employers are reluctant to hire new workers full time, resorting to temp agencies instead, because union contracts and government regulations make hiring full-time extraordinarily expensive and layoffs both costly and time consuming.

France's proposed first-job contract law was intended to diminish this punitive burden and thereby to encourage employers to hire more young people.

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.  Even for those fortunate enough to have jobs, the French economy is in worse shape than any of the other majors in Europe.  And this is just what the French seem to desire, because the idea of free-market competition, the only route to innovation and job growth, is regarded as American barbarism. 

The French, in effect, don't want cradle-to-grave government benefits; they want to be embalmed and laid to rest at birth.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1850s, after half-a-century of socialism in France, the French had become a nation of self-centered people, heedless of the greater good of society, intent only upon getting their prescribed government benefits, and prepared to endure any degree of despotism, so long as the benefits arrived.