Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Following up on the stunning success of the 35-hour workweek, the welfare system full of cash and prizes, and the free healthcare, the French government is preparing to add one more monumental expense to its list of freebies.

The French government plans to make housing a legally enforceable right, French PM Dominique de Villepin says.
A housing bill will be presented to the cabinet on 17 January, he said, as the government came under renewed pressure to help homeless people.

Squatters have moved into a vacant office block in Paris and also set up a tent city along a canal in the capital.

The office building, near the Paris stock exchange, has been nicknamed the “ministry for the housing crisis”.

Three housing lobby groups took it over and then invited families to move in. Homeless Parisians are also camping out in 200 tents by the Canal Saint Martin.

Lobby groups say about a million people in France are homeless, of whom 100,000 are sleeping on the streets.

Under the government plan, from the end of 2008, the right to housing will apply to homeless people, impoverished workers and single mothers.

All those living in slums are to benefit from the same right from the start of 2012, Mr de Villepin said.

The new legislation is designed to put housing in the same legal category as education and health in French law. It is a key demand of the campaign groups for the homeless.

If they got rid of their 35 hour work week, scaled back their fabulous cash and prizes, made it so that employers could fire incompetent employees, and reduced their two month annual vacations to two weeks, then they might not have a stagnating economy and 10%+ unemployment.  If the economy and unemployment situation improved there wouldn’t be so many bums.  So, by creating housing as a legal right, they’re exacerbating the problem, and guaranteeing a perpetual drain on their economy.  As these benefits eat up an even bigger and bigger portion of the French GDP, France will have to import more and more foreign workers to support the tax base.  These workers will inevitably come from North Africa and the Middle East, where the populations are primarily Muslim.  The more Muslims who reside in France, the quicker the inevitable slide of this once great nation to Europe’s first Islamic state.