Economy and Work

I do not consider markets an appropriate mechanism for organising every part of society.

Competition can sometimes improve efficiency or stimulate innovation, but it should not become a universal political principle.

Essential services, strategic infrastructure, natural monopolies, and systems requiring investment over several decades are often poorly suited to short-term market incentives.

Economic policy should therefore begin by asking what society needs, not by asking how a market can be created around it.

For strategic sectors, I increasingly prefer European public ownership to purely national ownership.

The objective is the same as nationalisation: democratic control over critical infrastructure and long-term capabilities.

However, many strategic systems now operate at a scale where European coordination is more appropriate.

Where justified, Europe should therefore be able to create or control public enterprises in areas such as:

• energy;
• railways;
• telecommunications;
• banking;
• digital infrastructure;
• semiconductor production;
• pharmaceuticals;
• strategic manufacturing;
• space infrastructure;
• other critical systems.

These organisations should serve long-term European needs rather than short-term shareholder returns.

Healthcare, education, public transport, energy networks, and other essential services should not be judged primarily by whether they generate a financial profit.

A hospital does not exist to make money.

A school does not exist to make money.

A railway network does not exist solely to maximise the profitability of each individual route.

Their returns are largely social, economic, scientific, territorial, and long-term.

Trying to impose conventional profitability requirements on such institutions can therefore destroy the very service they are supposed to provide.

Public expenditure on essential services should be evaluated according to the value of the service provided, not according to whether the institution itself produces a financial surplus.

Infrastructure such as electricity networks, railways, telecommunications, healthcare facilities, and digital systems should be planned over decades.

Such planning is difficult when investment decisions are dominated by short-term profitability.

Strategic infrastructure should therefore remain under strong public control, with investment decisions based on resilience, universal access, technical quality, environmental impact, and long-term need.

In an ideal European system, I would prefer banking to be primarily a public function.

Money creation, payment infrastructure, savings, credit, and financing are too important to the functioning of society to be treated solely as opportunities for private profit.

A strong European public banking system could finance:

• infrastructure;
• housing;
• research;
• industry;
• energy;
• environmental transition;
• strategic technologies;
• small and medium-sized enterprises.

At minimum, Europe should maintain powerful public banking institutions capable of financing long-term projects without depending exclusively on private financial markets.

I support a substantially more progressive tax system.

The burden of taxation should depend more strongly on the actual ability to pay.

Very high incomes, very large fortunes, and large inheritances should contribute substantially more.

At the same time, taxation should not place disproportionate pressure on middle and upper-middle income households while allowing extremely wealthy individuals or multinational companies to minimise their effective tax burden.

Large concentrations of wealth reproduce economic inequality across generations and can also become concentrations of political power.

I therefore support:

• progressive taxation of very large fortunes;
• stronger taxation of very large inheritances;
• reduction of unjustified tax exemptions;
• tighter control of tax shelters;
• greater transparency concerning ownership and assets.

The objective is not to eliminate private property.

It is to prevent inherited economic power from undermining equality of opportunity.

Europe should actively fight aggressive tax optimisation, tax avoidance, and harmful fiscal competition.

Companies and wealthy individuals should not be able to reduce their tax contribution simply by moving accounting structures, intellectual property, or financial assets between jurisdictions.

European fiscal policy should therefore include:

• greater tax harmonisation;
• minimum effective taxation;
• country-by-country transparency;
• stronger beneficial-ownership registers;
• information exchange;
• coordinated enforcement;
• sanctions against abusive arrangements.

Europe should also be willing to exert political and economic pressure on jurisdictions whose fiscal systems facilitate large-scale tax avoidance.

This applies both inside and outside the European Union.

Countries such as Luxembourg and Switzerland should not be exempt from serious European scrutiny simply because tax competition is politically convenient.

All wages should be protected against inflation.

When prices rise while nominal wages remain unchanged, workers experience a real reduction in income even if their contractual salary has not changed.

I therefore support systematic mechanisms ensuring that wages follow the cost of living.

Such protection should not be limited to the minimum wage.

Salary scales throughout the economy should be periodically revised so that inflation does not gradually erode purchasing power across entire professions.

France moved away from widespread automatic wage indexation during the anti-inflation policies of the early 1980s.

I consider the long-term consequences of this separation between wages and prices worth reconsidering.

The objective should be to prevent inflation from functioning as a silent mechanism for reducing real wages.

Beyond inflation indexation, salary structures themselves deserve periodic review.

Large differences between professions are not always explained by differences in social usefulness, difficulty, qualification, responsibility, or working conditions.

Public policy and collective bargaining should therefore periodically examine whether salary scales still correspond to the actual organisation and needs of society.

This is particularly important in sectors such as healthcare, education, research, engineering, public administration, and other essential activities.

A company should not be understood solely as the property of its shareholders.

Its productive capacity also depends on its workers, their skills, their knowledge, their time, and the organisation they collectively maintain.

Employees should therefore have a meaningful role in company governance.

This can include:

• representation on boards;
• participation in strategic decisions;
• stronger works councils;
• profit sharing;
• employee ownership;
• cooperative structures;
• rights concerning major restructurings or relocations.

Capital provides resources, but workers provide the productive force without which the company does not exist.

Corporate governance should reflect both realities.

Unemployment insurance, healthcare, pensions, and other forms of social protection are fundamental components of economic security.

They should not be treated simply as costs to be reduced.

Economic insecurity reduces practical freedom.

A person who cannot afford to lose a job, become ill, retrain, move, or refuse unsafe working conditions does not possess the same effective freedom as someone protected against those risks.

Social protection can therefore increase individual autonomy rather than restrict it.

I do not consider public debt figures, by themselves, an adequate measure of economic health.

Public debt is often discussed as if it were equivalent to household debt, but a state is not a household.

What matters is what borrowing finances, what productive or social assets are created, the monetary framework in which the debt exists, the cost of financing, and the long-term capacity of the economy.

Borrowing to maintain infrastructure, finance research, construct housing, decarbonise energy, or improve education cannot reasonably be evaluated in the same way as expenditure producing no durable benefit.

Debt arguments should therefore not be used automatically to justify lower public investment, weaker public services, longer working lives, or reduced social protection.

Fiscal constraints are real, but they should be analysed rather than treated as unquestionable political laws.

Continuous GDP growth should not be the central objective of economic policy.

An economy exists within physical limits.

Greater economic activity often requires additional energy, materials, land, transport, infrastructure, and environmental extraction.

Growth can sometimes result from genuine efficiency or knowledge gains, but it can also simply represent increased material throughput.

The objective should therefore be balance rather than growth for its own sake.

Economic policy should consider indicators such as:

• material consumption;
• energy use;
• carbon emissions;
• ecosystem condition;
• health;
• education;
• housing;
• inequality;
• resilience;
• working conditions;
• available time;
• quality of public services.

A society can become better without necessarily becoming larger in monetary terms.

Money is an accounting and coordination mechanism.

It is not itself a physical resource.

Every economy ultimately depends on:

• energy;
• materials;
• land;
• ecosystems;
• labour;
• knowledge;
• infrastructure;
• time.

Economic policy should therefore remain subordinate to physical reality.

A financially inexpensive solution can be extremely costly in energy, materials, pollution, or long-term dependency.

Conversely, an apparently expensive public investment may create durable physical infrastructure and reduce resource consumption for decades.

Monetary accounting should inform decisions, not replace physical analysis.

Housing is a basic human need and should not be treated solely as a speculative asset.

It is unacceptable for people to remain homeless while usable housing remains vacant.

Public authorities should therefore take a much stronger role in housing policy.

This should include:

• construction of public and social housing;
• renovation of existing buildings;
• action against long-term vacancy;
• regulation of speculative practices;
• rent controls where local conditions justify them;
• protection against abusive evictions;
• better use of existing housing stock.

Property rights remain important, but they should not make large-scale inefficient use of housing socially untouchable.

Persistent vacancy in areas where people lack housing represents a failure of resource allocation.

Public authorities should identify long-term vacant properties and use progressive mechanisms to encourage their return to use.

These mechanisms can include taxation, incentives for renovation and rental, public acquisition in exceptional cases, and stronger regulation where speculative vacancy becomes significant.

The objective should be to use existing buildings efficiently before consuming more land and materials to construct additional ones unnecessarily.

European economic rules should serve European society, not constrain it for the sake of abstract market principles.

Competition law, state-aid rules, fiscal rules, and procurement rules should be revised when they prevent coherent industrial, social, environmental, or strategic policy.

Europe should be able to:

• create public enterprises;
• finance strategic industries;
• support public services;
• invest directly in infrastructure;
• protect critical capabilities;
• favour European production where strategically justified;
• coordinate taxation;
• maintain technological independence;
• finance large-scale environmental programmes.

The European project should not exist primarily to create markets.

Markets should serve the European political project.

The central economic question should not be:

"How can we maximise growth?"

It should be:

"How can we organise available energy, resources, knowledge, labour, and infrastructure so that people can live well without destroying the physical systems on which society depends?"

This requires balancing:

• individual freedom;
• equality;
• social protection;
• environmental limits;
• productive capacity;
• technological progress;
• resource conservation;
• long-term resilience.

Economic success should ultimately be measured by the quality and durability of the society it supports, not by the indefinite expansion of a monetary indicator.