Can Libertarians Support Le Pen?

by Cécile Philippe

I did not vote in the last French presidential elections, first because I am in the United States, and second because the program of all the candidates is disgusting to me. France is, after all, the most socialist country in the Western world. But the second-place finish of the right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen against President Jacques Chirac, and the coming run-off between them, is so astonishing that I looked more carefully at the programs of the two finalists. Here is another surprise. Despite his protectionist views, Le Pen should also be known for his libertarian ones.

It is true that Le Pen's program is structured round "national preference." For example, he defends the protection of the national market in order to reserve jobs for French people. He proposes to reestablish commercial frontiers to protect French labor and products. That measure would be accompanied by the "recapture" of the interior market and of exports. He also suggests that he would "restabilize" the relations between big and small enterprises. He calls himself an anti-globalist. He wants national preference written in the constitution.

Yet protectionism is first unjust and second inefficient. It is unjust because it does not respect the property rights of French people, employers or employees, consumers or producers, who want to import products or hire foreigners they consider more able to serve to their needs. The first right of a human being is to control his body, and then the resources he has homesteaded or exchanged. Consequently, every exercise of violence against voluntary exchange is an act against liberty and thus unjust.

Protectionist measures are also inefficient because they hinder the satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumer. They are "those measures undertaken by the authority, which directly and primarily are intended to divert production, in the widest meaning of the word, including commerce and transportation, from the ways it would take in the unhampered market." It makes people poorer, which is particularly obvious in international trade. Restriction on mobility of products, capital goods, and labor hinders the operation of what Ricardo called The Law of Comparative Cost, the fact that each country turns toward those areas of production for which its condition offer comparatively, although not absolutely, the most favorable opportunities.

Despite these very negative elements, Le Pen also defends liberty and justice in some important area. First, he advocates ending-and he is the only candidate to have done so-the 35-hour law, which is an infamy. It prohibits laborers from working more than 35 hours per week because they should "share the work" with those who do not have any (thanks to other interventions by the welfare state). Nobody can say on a priori grounds how many hours someone should work. This is something to be decided in the contract between employee and employer. Besides, this law is counter-productive on its own terms, since it hinders exchanges that would otherwise have occurred, while at the same time promoting other exchanges that would never have taken place in a free market, exactly because they would not have been efficient.

An even more important point is that Le Pen denounces the Treaty of Maastricht and the Euro currency. Whereas all the other candidates (Chirac, Jospin …) want to build a "Big Europe," Le Pen wants to get rid of all the agreements signed in the last years, in order to get out of the Euro. He also wants to put an end to that "huge machine of laws," the Commission of Brussels. These would be very important steps toward liberty. The Euro is a very bad money in the hand of inflationists, and the Brussels Commission has amazing powers of property-rights destruction.

Another important point of Le Pen's program concerns taxation. Taxation is one of the involuntary means that government uses to finance itself. Every step toward its diminution increases liberty and efficiency. Le Pen proposes to suppress inheritance, income, and land taxes, and to lighten the taxation of businesses and financial transfers. Of course, we have to wonder how he will do that, as he wants to increase spending on such things as subsidies for children and the munitions manufacturers. On the other hand, he does criticize US military hegemony.

Finally, Le Pen clearly defends disengagement from the government by advocating a reduction in public employment and the restoration of free choice in schooling, and he even comes close to suggesting a free market in adoptions.

None of these points make Le Pen a consistent defender of liberty, but for those French libertarians willing to support the lesser of evils, that is clearly Le Pen as compared to Chirac.

Among the 97 points of Chirac's program, you will hardly find anything liberal. As he tries to please everybody and not to forget anybody, you will, of course, find very little emphasis on tax reduction. But that is nothing as compared to the 90% of his program, which is pure socialism and demagogy. In favor of an "ecologically responsible and economically strong" agriculture, Chirac promises to spend more on the military and the police. He wants to create new interventions in the job market for young people, a new ministry of ecology, a worldwide organization for the environment, and subsidies to allow women to keep their kids at home. He proposes to reform the State, to humanize globalization, to fight for professional egalitarianism, to put an end to the ghettos, and to enact a European constitution. Through his 97 points, Chirac slashes liberties and propagates confusion.

April 26, 2002

Cecile Philippe, a doctoral student in economics at the University of Paris IX, is a visiting fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.