Everything’s an Emergency If memory serves, France remains in a state of emergency on account of the terror attack in Paris in last November. As terrible as terror attacks are, they are a statistically insignificant cause of death and injury in developed nations. It is also worth noting that the countries that seem most prone to suffering terror attacks are the ones that are most active in intervening militarily in foreign countries. This is probably no coincidence. Just saying.
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We also imagine that a state of emergency is a costly exercise (France’s government immediately exempted itself from meeting the Maastricht deficit target in the wake of the attack, so we can conclude this by inference). Moreover, the recurrence of such attacks shows that ubiquitous snooping on everybody’s digital communications is a wasted effort, if the goal is indeed to keep such attacks from happening (which is doubtful, but that is a topic for another day).
France is in fact one of the world’s top snoopers, but appears to have ignored information and warnings from Turkey’s secret service – information which reportedly was obtained by traditional investigative means and turned out to be correct.
Now there is another emergency, this time an economic one. Mr. Hollande (a.k.a. ‘the welfare state incarnate’, h/t Gaspard Koenig) has just declared that his government will pull out all stops in terms of labor market intervention, so as finally stop the inexorable rise in French unemployment. His main motive seems to be saving his own job, as Mish notes.
This post was published at Acting-Man on January 21, 2016.
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