Why These Things Happen

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Why These Things Happen
  About three weeks ago I happened to look into my wallet and find it rather empty, so I walked down to my usual ATM to withdraw a few Euros. I put the card in the machine, watched the French ATM slowly chug it in, and pressed all the usual buttons. When the screen finally told me to withdraw my card…there was no card tended to withdraw. I waited – still no card. Finally, the machine made a gurgling noise and informed me that my card had been withheld – for security reasons. This was a Saturday night.   Flustered and wondering how I became a security risk to my own bank card such that this foreign bank felt itself entitled to take the card, I went home and waited for the bank to open again (Tuesday morning). I presented myself, my passport and a photocopy of the lost card, and asked for it back, please. The bank clerk promptly went to the back room and came back with my card, then made a quick phone call and told me I couldn’t have it. Apparently, Visa had simply said I couldn’t. And there wasn’t a thing the bank could do to help me. And that was it. Later I learned that the French even have a phrase for such ATMS: “les guichets automatiques mangeurs de cartes,” the card-eating ATMs.   Whom to blame for this? Aristotle tells us there are four causes to everything, and for the event of “me losing my card and not being able to get it back” the “efficient cause” would most likely be the fact that the machine was defective or broken and simply didn’t hand me my card when it meant to. The final cause, the overarching purpose, must have been to teach me a lesson about traveling abroad. It doesn’t really have a material cause since it’s an abstract event, but the formal cause – the sort of essence of the event – that goes straight to the heart of the French welfare state.   Really, if you think about it, such a thing couldn’t happen in the States, or at least not more than once per machine (as was certainly the case with this machine – I should have noticed that that it was always free even while the machine to its side had a queue). Someone would complain so loudly, raising his or her fist high into the air, that the bank would have to fix the ATM straightaway. It’s our right in America not to be so inconvenienced, just as it is our right to go to grocery stores open 24 hours a day or boutiques open at least past 6 PM.   Upon reflection, of course these aren’t really rights at all – they are privileges or customs to which we have become habituated, so much so that their privation seems a violation of a self-evident right, even if it isn’t. But that word, “right,” is thrown about so much that it is a natural jump from the right to the pursuit of happiness to the supposed right to be happy. One young friend of mine once tried to explain to me that the latter of these really did exist as a God-given right; she also tried to explain how people have a right to walk, even when they have no legs.   But the fault for the inflation in the term “right” lies not just with a faulty American primary and secondary schooling system as it can be found in industrialized countries the world over. If Americans have an overdeveloped sense of personal liberties, the French have an overdeveloped notion of rights to social benefits. It’s become a sort of stereotype in the US, the Frenchman holding on to his farm subsidies, striking whenever the mood so inspires him, working 35 hours a week, and enjoying three weeks’ vacation guaranteed (minimum!), not to mention free healthcare. A quick look through the pages of Libération will confirm your fears as you find articles condemning François Fillon’s recent statement hinting at setting a minimum number of days teachers are required to work in a year (God forbid they be required to work to keep their jobs!) or declaiming against any attempt to loosen Gaz de France’s monopoly on natural gas in order to allow the price of gas to fluctuate with the market.   This much is well-known and documented, and here most people would blame the difference on culture: the French are lazy, or the Americans are greedily individualistic. There is, however, a larger, more influential cause behind this difference in culture, and it concerns the unique direction the French state pointed the economy in the years after the war.   In order to rebuild the country from three destructive wars with Germany the French state invested heavily in industry – France Télécom, for example, became one of the largest of the state-run enterprises, planting telephone poles about the country. To provide stability for the young 4th (and later, 5th) Republic it began to give large benefits with these jobs such that a state job as a fonctionnaire meant a stable job for life.   This worked well enough for a time, but, in very general terms, France (like every other industrialized nation) began to lose its comparative advantage in heavy industry; nations like Japan and China today can produce the same material for a tenth of the price even though the French and the Americans are more productive at producing them. This is an exogenous factor that hit both the US and France starting in the 70s and 80s, but the two nations responded differently: the US largely found (and is finding) other work to do in which they do have a comparative advantage, but the French,…
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