Daddy, I want a job and I want it now!

Veruca, Daddy can’t give you a job whenever you want them anymore, there are no jobs left.

You'll give me a job now!!!

Sweetheart, nearly 30% of people your age also want a job and the other
70% are so incredibly lazy because they never can be fired that companies cannot hire anymore.

Daddy if you don’t give me a job I’m going to SCREAM!!!

Darling the only way companies would be willing to hire more people
your age is if they were allowed some recourse if you decided to smoke, smell bad
and listen to your incredibly gay French club music instead working.
Oh Veruca, how this pains me. I’m going to have to give them 2 years after
you graduate from college to fire you if things are not working out.

Daddy you make me so MAD! It doesn’t matter how hard I work or how smart I am I’m entitled to the same way of life you had. I hate you! I hate you! I don’t care if people in China are willing to work 80 hours a week at $1 an hour with no vacation time. I want 100% job security, a generous salary, generous, free benefits, 3 months of vacation and a 35 hour work week and I’m not going to let your cowboy capitalist ideas turn people my age into the Kleenex generation. I went to COLLEGE daddy. My reward is a lifetime vacation from reality and it starts NOW!

Alright, Alright Veruca honey here’s what I’ll do, I’ll only give companies 1 year to fire you IF they have an approved reason.

Not good enough Daddy!!! Now I want a pony!!!

UPDATE: A very funny take on the subject of france openly embracing sloth.

UPDATE: One of NPR’s favorite guest authors and progressive activist, Barbara Ehrenreich writes in this month’s Progressive Magazine:

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing
the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” too fattened on Camembert to
stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another
look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March
and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a
right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s
whim.

And…

You may recognize in the French government’s reasoning the same arguments
Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a
halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: “What?” scream the
economists who flack for the employing class. “If you do anything, anything at
all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly
failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you—lacking, of course, the
health care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state—will quickly
spiral down into starvation.”

Ah yes progressives may have briefly publicly flirted with the Scandinavian social model (which is now rapidly crumbling) but their hearts will always belong to France. No system more fully embraces the progressive credo: “Don’t like economic reality? Protest it!”.

UPDATE: France surrenders to itself.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan declares France dead:

If the French cannot accept even the teensiest attemp to bring market discipline and free labor markets to their over-regulated economy, then they need no longer be considered a nation with a future. They are a nation committing an extremely slow suicide by suffocation. The suffocation is caused by an overdose of insecurity. Its only cure is nerve. But nerve was never a very common French trait, was it?