Now There's Talk in France About Nationalizing the French Shipping Industry

When it rains, it pours.

And it's raining all over the concept of private property rights in France these days. The 'rain' began began earlier this week with President Francois Hollande threatening to nationalize some steel making facilities owned by ArcelorMittal. That was all the encouragement needed for French labor unions representing shipyard workers to call for the French government to expropriate the  property of a South Korean company. So now the 'downpour' has come to France.

To begin with, let me confess my clear bias. The French are crazy. At least that's my long held view. Now let's continue.

Earlier we reported on loose talk by Socialist French President Francois Hollande about perhaps nationalizing some of Arcelor's steel making facilities.

Now it's shipping that gets the nod. Seems like the "good" old days of nationalizing businesses may be returning to France as efforts to kill any hopes of economic growth and the future well being of French citizens are underway by influential French union leaders in support of the recently elected Socialist French President.

Talk of Nationalization Gets New Life in France tells about the union movement to nationalize shipping:

 

Workers demonstrating in May for the STX shipyard in St.-Nazaire in France to stay open despite a lack of orders.

"PARIS — Has President François Hollande let the nationalization genie out of the bottle?

After Mr. Hollande and his industry minister raised this week the possibility that the French state would take over an ArcelorMittal steel factory in a dispute over the foreign company’s plans to close two blast furnaces, union workers in another industry — shipbuilding — are calling for the government to seize their foreign employer’s property.

 

The French corporate establishment is bracing for a global backlash, if the nationalization impulse takes hold.

 

On Thursday, unions representing workers at the STX shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, on the Atlantic coast, issued a joint statement demanding that the French government “do everything possible to keep the shipyard open, even, if necessary, breaking European Union rules.”

 

The shipyard is already partially owned by the French government, but is controlled by STX, a South Korean business group. With business slow in the yard’s mainstay cruise ship building industry, about half of the shipyard’s labor force of 2,100 is now idled. The unions are betting that the current Socialist government, if it controlled the shipyard, would put everyone back to work.

 

“The door is open, and we want to open it as wide as possible,” Jean-Marc Pérez, the representative of the Force Ouvrière union at the STX shipyard, told the media. The nationalization of the shipyard, where almost half of the 2,000 workers are furloughed on partial pay, “is essential,” he said.

 

An STX spokeswoman in Saint-Nazaire and a spokesman in Seoul both declined to comment on the unions’ demands. . . .  

 

Unions have long called for government intervention at the shipyard, given the labor lull. But the dispute with ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, and based in Luxembourg, is giving new life to their demands. . . .  

 

Talk of nationalization is being applauded by some in a country where the jobless rate is over 10 percent, and where intervention is not a dirty word. In the early 1980s, the last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, nationalized much of the economy, before later reversing course.

 

Jean-Luc Gironde, a Force Ouvrière spokesman in Paris, said the union did not advocate nationalization as a general policy. But “in a case like ArcelorMittal, where the enterprise has been the beneficiary of public funds, why not?”

 

But there has also been a sharp reaction from business leaders.

 

“If the point is to add pressure and blackmail in the negotiations, it is inadmissible,” Laurence Parisot, president of the Medef employers’ lobby, told RTL television on Thursday. “Our society is built on the basis of property rights,” she added. “To undermine that principle is scandalous, and it’s expensive.”

 

Summing Up

 

Socialism, the collective ownership of property, means that property is owned by the sovereign and not by private indiviudals or companies.

 

The difference between property that is owned publicly, aka collectively, and property owned privately, aka individually, is very simple. Unlike private property ownership, when property is owned by the public, nobody can sell what everybody purportedly owns.

 

And it's the same way with jobs and the payroll. Nobody's in control when everybody's in control.

Who pays the employees who occupy the jobs that the nation supplies? All of the nation's taxpayers.

At least that's what happens when the "government business" isn't profitable.

And if the private sector company owners can't make a profit, you can be dead certain that the government won't be able to do so.

 

Which brings us to the whole problem with government spending. It's money spent on behalf of everybody, so the money spent is controlled by nobody.

When it's all about OPM, MOM isn't even in the game.

 

The French are crazy, and the French are also broke. The French have a double digit unemployment rate, and their nation's finances are in shambles.

If they now embark on even a semi-serious discussion to create jobs by nationalizing unprofitable private businesses, they really will be up that famous creek and without a paddle.

 

People often do crazy things, but the French people, and their leaders, take craziness to a whole new level.

 

We'll stay tuned but in the meantime, let's hope our U.S. politicians are paying attention to all this French nonsense and where continuous and ill advised business bashing can lead a nation's people.

Nowhere good, that's for sure.

 

Thanks. Bob.