Retirement blues

If the Grinch were running against Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency today, the green grouchy Christmas hater would win in a landslide. Yesterday, the lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, voted 336-233 to raise the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 and the age for a full pension from 65 to 67. Imagine packing your scuba gear and dreaming of spending the last quarter of your life at the sunny beaches of Martinique when suddenly the government tells you that they refuse to pay for your croissants. You are ordered to go back to your office, pick up the phone, and keep pushing paper for two more years. How inhumane to force people to work in their old age with just six weeks of paid vacation per year!

The French unions did not do much to organize their members when Hitler marched into Paris on July 14, 1940. Now they are in a tantrum. Obviously entitlements rank way higher than freedoms in that part of the world. American radicals would like to see something historical, sweeping, and profound in this year's garbage strikes and student lootings in Europe. Ever since Marx and Engels published their Manifesto in 1848, leftist ideologues have seen the specter of communism behind every non-soccer-related disturbance of the peace. They have specialized in doomsday prophecies, having predicted 20 of the three major economic contractions since WWII. We have seen strikes and recessions before; these too shall pass without sounding the death knell of private property.

The French Socialist party naturally opposed the "profoundly unfair" legal changes. As usual, leftists have no alternative plan how to avoid bankruptcy other than "expropriation of the expropriators." We tried it in Bulgaria-my father was mobilized as a teenager to storm the houses of landowners and confiscate their food for the common good. Look what we reap for our good intentions a generation later. Is there a lesson to be learned from the tragic fate of the French worker? Indeed-just like marriage, retirement should not be legislated by men. The sooner we push the government out of our choices between work and leisure, the better. Think about it-would you strike against yourself if you were free to decide how hard to work, how much to save, how to invest your savings, and when to retire? Entrepreneurs have that freedom; wage earners like me deserve no less. And we all need the freedom to learn from God's lesson on retirement-Luke 12:16-21.