RCP: To say that France's social model is far from perfect is an understatement: in spite of the state absorbing more than 50% of GDP, France has suffered, since the 1980s, from rising child poverty rates, persistently high unemployment, a chronic sense of economic malaise, and the continual enrichment of the system's "insiders" at the expense of the system's "outsiders." More importantly, France's social model fails to deliver precisely what it proclaims to: economic justice, inter-generational fairness, economic opportunity and social protection, particularly to young workers entering the labor market, minorities, immigrants, middle-aged women and other vulnerable groups.
Well, as I noted here, the idea that socialism somehow insures more equal opportunity is demonstrably false. Socialism purports to be interested in the "little guy" when in fact it is a system designed to create barriers to entry which, by their very nature, insure that the little guy will almost never become big, and even more despicably, that the big guy will almost never become little. Thus, socialism protects the vested interests of the elite by restricting class mobility. In this sense, socialism is, at least economically speaking, nothing more than a modernized form of feudalism, and, it suffers from feudalism's two central problems--stagnant growth and lack of economic mobility.
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