“Real cost to the employer and real value to the employee are two jaws of a machine that grinds and destroy jobs. Unemployment that should hover around 5-6 per cent gradually moves to double digits. It is now 11.9 per cent in Germany, 10.2 per cent in France and 9.6 per cent in Italy. These are official statistics that need some interpretation. In France, for instance, the unemployment figures do not include about 1.2 million people who do not qualify for unemployment insurance but are paid a minimum income by the state. In every country run on the “European social model”, the public sector is stuffed with make-work jobs whose sole real purpose is to keep some hopeless young people off the streets. These jobs, too, escape the unemployment statistics”. –Anthony de Jasay, an Anglo-Hungarian economist living in France.
‘In France, for instance, the unemployment figures do not include about 1.2 million people who … are paid a minimum income by the state. In every country run on the “European social model”, the public sector is stuffed with make-work jobs whose sole real purpose is to keep some hopeless young people off the streets.’
Yes, and in the U.S. they put them in prison or in its gargantuan military - the only government make-work programme which is actually a danger to hundreds of millions of people all over the planet.
The fool who is being quoted here obviously has no idea how unemployment statistics are effectively fabricated in every country that generates them. Official unemployment rates are all artificial creations reflecting whatever policies governments choose to use to keep them down to politically-tolerable levels. It is ludicrous to suggest that unemployment rates are only fabricated by such means in European countries. My own research suggests that the UK and the US are probably the worst offenders.
Those seriously interested in this topic (not just interested in scoring cheap ideological points) might like to read the following interesting article as an introduction:
http://www.radstats.org.uk/no079/webster.htm
Or in France, they let them run in the streets burning everything…I kid, I kid. Thanks for the link.