Every day we see cumulative evidence of the growing contradiction between
the market and democracy. Democracy means borders. Geographical boundaries
that define its jurisdiction. Functional boundaries, which define the areas
covered by the policy. While the market, itself, by nature, has no borders:
merchants, capital, workers, consumers, employees must be able to go
wherever they want, sell what they want, buy what they want, work wherever
they want, invest where they want. Democracy is sedentary. The market is
nomadic.
We find this in what is at stake today: the financial crisis finds its
source there. Policy finds its limit there, being agitated in pathetic
shows, even though the essential part no longer depends on it. It is also
found, in particular, in what is at stake around L’Oréal.
Even if this story has numerous dimensions, involving financing strategy,
exploitation of old age and a scandalous mixture between politicians
fascinated by money and stratospheric fortunes, the main thing is in my
opinion what this case tells us about the possibility for politics, not to
give in to the market.
In fact, if the market was the only master, Mrs. Bettencourt, would have
been a fiscal expatriate since a long time. She is not. This is not without
significance: L’Oréal, strategic company of the future, is still French only
because the heiress of its founder has decided not to move, whereas for
purely financial reasons, she should have done so long ago, as do some new
fortunes to save a few fractions of their heritage.
Whatever her real motivations, whatever tax evasion her advisers have been
guilty of, it is quite certain that she understood, like others with her,
that true wealth is precisely to be able to choose to live where we have the
pleasure to live and not where the tax rate is the lowest. She understands
that we must be very poor, humanly and culturally, to decide to escape tax
and let the market decide our fate. And if some, younger, less wealthy than
her, subject themselves to these diktats. It is because the nation has not
found good ways to convince them to stay.
Here is the important part: democracy cannot fight against the market on the
same ground. It should not resign itself to be deprived of its budgetary
resources to attract those who do not care about its fate. It should not
reduce taxation to nothing , hoping to keep the richest, or make it too
excessive, hoping to help the poorest. Democracy must fight with other
weapons: those of education, innovation, culture, pleasure to live together,
of the social pact. Indeed experience shows that there are few tax emigrants
in countries with high tax rates, where politicians are able to share a
collective project, with people who accept the constraints without cheating.
Politics cannot balance the market by bending to its laws. It can only do so
by offering a few good reasons for nomads to share their destiny with the
settlers.