[witek]

I guess my comment wasn't strictly limited to this court decision but I wouldn't consider it as French-bashing. I have nothing against your country and compatriots, and I have enjoyed many fun moments there. However, I and my two French flatmates are genuinely curious how France can continue on its current public-spending/entrepreneurship-throttling trajectory.

[simias]

It's an interesting discussion and I have mixed feelings about the current french "trajectory" as you put it. However I don't think this is the place to discuss politics so I'll refrain from engaging in this debate.

However I think from a hacker perspective it should be interesting to see a country that tries to do things differently from what appears to be the norm in most of the western world and whether it'll succeed or fail utterly. I know that most people on HN are big on "laissez-faire" and business deregulations but it's a bit disingenuous to present it as the solution to all problems.

We value thinking out of the box for engineering, why not for politics? "Look, a new economic system in 30 lines of socialism!".

I wish people were less adamant and more level-headed when it came to politics and economy, it's hard to have a reasonable discussion on those subjects.

[vidarh]

> However, I and my two French flatmates are genuinely curious how France can continue on its current public-spending/entrepreneurship-throttling trajectory.

Look at a graph of GDP per capita for France vs. other countries (Google will happily draw one for you if you search for "gdp per capita france" - for me it shows comparisons to UK and Germany)

As it happens, it turns out that the rather substantial aggressive changes to things like working hours and tax laws over the years in France that have caused predictions of doom and gloom have had little to no noticeable impact on GDP per capita - the trajectory for France, UK, Germany and other major European countries are only very minimally differentiated based on their economic policies.

That is how France can continue this.