Quote of the Day: England’s Theodore Dalrymple

From Theodore Dalrymple at UK’s Times Online (HT OpinionJournal.com’s Best of the Web):

The Striking Idiocy of Youth

The sight of millions of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours.

….. Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the [predominantly Muslim] youth of the banlieues — who recently so amused the world for an entire fortnight with their arsonist antics — exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed. For unless the French labor market is liberalized, they will never find employment and therefore integration into French society. You have only to speak to a few small businessmen or artisans in France — the petits bourgeois so vehemently despised by the snobbish intellectuals — to find out why this should be so. The French labor regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them.”

Of course. It’s always the lowest people on the economic ladder who get hurt the most by artificial labor-market restrictions. Seen properly from Dalrymple’s perspective, the French marchers are engaging in selfish racism, “whether they know it or not.”