Translated from French
The tax on small Chinese packages is a failure. Total surprise. The packages now transit through Belgium before arriving in France, French logistics jobs have vanished, and the consumer pays the same. Bercy is discovering the second law of thermodynamics applied to economics: a constrained system always finds its leak.
This story is tiny, but it is the perfect embodiment of the French problem. Every time the State touches the economy, it ends up crashing into the wall. Every time. Without exception. Not by bad luck. By design.
The economy is not a spreadsheet. It is a living system of billions of agents who make decisions every second based on their local constraints. When you tax Chinese packages, you do not magically create French jobs. You create a disruption that the system circumvents in a few weeks, by routing through Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, or any less-taxed entry point.
The market is a moving object. It has a distributed intelligence that no one, absolutely no one, can outmatch from a ministerial desk. Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel for formalizing exactly this point in 1974. Fifty years later, our senior civil servants are still empirically discovering what he had theoretically demonstrated.
The only known mechanism for coordinating billions of simultaneous economic decisions is the price system in a free-trade framework. Prices transmit real-time information on scarcity, demand, quality, risk. No computer, no algorithm, no planning committee can replicate this informational density. This is not an ideological opinion. It is a theorem.
When a Bercy official decides to tax packages to "protect French jobs," he imagines a first-order effect. Packages become more expensive. So fewer packages. So more local jobs. Cause and effect, straight line, case closed.
But the economy never operates on first-order effects. It operates in cascades. Second-order effect: distributors reroute their flows. Third-order effect: logistics hubs set up in Belgium, and French jobs disappear. Fourth-order effect: French VAT is no longer collected. Fifth-order effect: consumers still pay, so their purchasing power drops. Sixth-order effect: they consume less elsewhere, which destroys jobs in other sectors. The net balance of the measure is negative on every indicator it claimed to improve.
No civil servant in the world has the cognitive capacity to foresee a six-order cascade in a system of this complexity. This is not a question of individual intelligence. It is a structural limit of centralized intelligence facing distributed complexity. The world's best economists cannot do it. No Bercy senior official can, no matter the degree.
So either they are insane, or they are disconnected from reality. In both cases, they have no business at the helm.
The conclusion is simple. Every time a politician announces that he will "protect" a sector, "support" an industry, "regulate" a market, "frame" a practice, you can bet 100 to 1 that the result will be the opposite of the stated goal. This is the most solid empirical regularity in French political economy over the last fifty years.
The market regulates itself. It has always known how to do it. What never regulates itself is the bureaucrats' pretension to know better than hundreds of millions of consumers and producers what is good for them.
The only operating mode that works is the following. The State guarantees contracts, property, physical security. And it gets out. Everything else is in the hands of those who have their skin in the game—that is, entrepreneurs, producers, consumers.
Everything else is Soviet-style planning in Saint Laurent garb. And Soviet planning has a historically perfect success rate: zero.
No comments:
Post a Comment