With the French protests over the youth labor law verging on a country-wide general strike, the Wall Street Journal laments the spectacle of the “boys and girls of the Sorbonne” dreaming only of being (in de Gaulle’s phrase) “‘mediocre but secure”–and that at the expense of poorer young people trying to enter the work force.
But what else should one expect of students–indeed a populace–which has not been taught about the economic benefits of a more flexible labor market and its indispensability for competing in the global marketplace?
Higher educators, as Thomas Sowell writes, are to blame for such obliviousness, which is hardly confined to France:
“[T]hat such profound ignorance of basic economics and such self-indulgent emotionalism should be prevalent at elite institutions of higher education is one of the many deep-seated failures of universities on both sides of the Atlantic.”