 Welcome, everyone. It is Monday, April 24th. We're speaking with our good friend and colleague, Louis Rene. Many of you will recognize his name. He's someone who writes frequently at mises.org. He also spent a couple of summers here in Auburn with us as a summer fellow. Louis is currently a graduate student finishing his master's in economics at Sienc's Poe University in Paris. And in the fall, he'll be moving back to the United States to pursue a PhD in economics. So all that said, Louis, welcome. It's great to see you again. Thank you for having me. Well, first and foremost, what are your initial thoughts about the election yesterday? Do you think Le Pen underperformed or overperformed relative to expectations? Okay, I think that the main surprise is not that much that she's close from Macron, but rather that actually Fignon performed pretty well with all the justice issues he had. He's at 20%. You have a difference of less than two points between him and Le Pen. So it's actually quite impressive, but I didn't expect him to be in the second turn of the election because you had too much problems with his personality. Well, there's justice issues, yeah, I am. Right. And where do you think most of his voters will go in the second round election? I think it can be divided in three parts. Like one third is abstention, they won't vote. So one other third will be Macron, and the last third will be Le Pen. Really? I think so. So a bit of a split. Well, that being said, what do you think Le Pen's chances are in the second round? Do you think she can win? I think you don't have many. Maybe some people are already too optimistic about Macron and because they say almost declaring him as a president, a little bit like in the U.S. with Clinton, and maybe you remember Newsweek cover about President Clinton, and some people seem to act the same. But I don't think she has many chances to be elected. Okay, well, when we're looking at Macron, he's a very unknown quantity in the United States. In reading about him, clearly the Beltway favors him in this election, including Beltway libertarians, I might add. Now, it appears that he's truly an independent in that he ran without an established party in the election. Independence in the United States have had a very hard time winning without the Democratic or Republican machines behind them. How do you think he was able to do this as an independent? Well, in France, it's the same, like independence, we call them centrists. They always had a hard time to be elected. But I think it's a very peculiar situation we have now. We have a very unpopular president in the polls. He had only 4% of favorable opinions. So it's a very, very historically low. And yeah, also, people are seeking for other ways because they are disaffected with politics in general. So the fact that this guy never really even received a mandate from anyone before, worked a little bit in the private sector, although not much, well, probably made a difference. Well, if you consider being a Rothschilds banker, private sector, I guess he did. So what he did is like public relation. The guy just did a school that we call Lena, which is a national school of administration where also high ranked public officials go to beer. High ranked public officials. And afterwards, he was on the Atali Commission, which was a commission to seek for solutions for the French economy in 2007. And in 2008, he met François Hollande and actually kept pretty close to him. So he's a little bit more free market friendlies than François Hollande, the current president. But I mean, it's nuances and not really anything. Right, a little more free market than Hollande. That's a ringing endorsement from you, Louis. Exactly. Yeah, well, I'm not endorsing him on anything. I just say that also how he got known is actually by talking to the right wing people. What he did is to make some very controversial claims to give you an example, controversial claims about the legal working time limit or about one day he said, if you want to buy a suit, the best way is to work. So that's very controversial things for socialist people. And people in the socialist party and he was a minister in the socialist government. So he represented a more moderate or more free market branch of the socialist party, which doesn't mean much, but actually played a huge role because right wing columnists and intellectuals said, oh, this guy is pretty good. Maybe there is something. And after during the campaign, he became more and more leftist and gave up his more free market ideas, just giving and this to everybody. And so now he pretty much has no program. We discovered this program very late. It's a 17 pages long program, which is very short compared to the other candidates. And actually it's not detailed at all. He says, oh, I will deregulate some stuff, but we don't know what. I will reduce some spending, but it's not specified, but you have some increase in spending too. On a general level, what is also worrying is that actually some libertarians defend this guy because he wants to reestablish a draft. I don't think that any libertarian can defend somebody who wants that. That's maybe one of the biggest point in libertarianism. The draft is something really bad. It's the equivalent or almost the equivalent of slavery. Right. Well, let's forget what he says for a moment. What do you think is in his heart? Do you think he's closer to a true believer Bernie Sanders socialist? Or do you think he's closer to a Hillary Clinton neoliberal globalist? Oh, no, a Larry Clinton type. Yeah, for sure. The Bernie Sanders type would be Jean-Luc Mélenchon who lost in the first turn of the election, but actually did a very, very good score and also improved a lot. So he is at 19.5%. And he did an amazing campaign. I would say that he did them on a technical level. He did the best campaign this year, especially on the social medias. Right. Well, you know, Americans who think that France is more socialist than the United States, if Bernie Sanders had been on some sort of open primary ticket here, he would have gotten easily 19%, probably much more than that. So we're, I think, just as far along as France in terms of our ideological errors here. Louis... Well, but you have also candidates also that were even more radical than Bernie Sanders and openly Marxist and revolutionary candidates. I don't think those can exist in America. So there were something like 11 total candidates on the ballot? I think 10, yeah. 10. Okay. In California, for instance, in the United States, we have what's called a jungle primary where anyone can enter the primary and the two highest vote getters proceed to the general election, regardless of whether they're both Democrats, for example. In the French second round system, could you have two people from the same party in the second round or is that not how it works? No, no, no, no. Okay. It does not happen. Particular party gets one representative in the earlier round. There could be two people who have similar ideas. Right. But not two people from the same party. What I was I did is to... So the two major parties before the election, so the Socialist Party on the one hand who just collapsed completely, it's at 6% in this election. So it's completely almost vanished. And Republicans, they said, well, we are going to do primaries before the election because it's a way for us to ensure we monopolize public debate. But it didn't work very well since, well, none of them are actually selecting in the second turn of the election, so. Right. Well, last time we spoke, we talked a lot about Marine Le Pen and this distinction that exists in America as it does in France between urban versus rural voters. This city versus country divide was a big issue in the Trump campaign. And since we last spoke, there's been yet another article on this. And this time it was by Christopher Caldwell on The City Journal called The French Coming Apart. And he talks about the French version of what we call in the US a rust belt. He termed it Le France, Paris-Farique, Paris-Farique, periphery. I'm probably pronouncing that badly. How much do you think that played a part yesterday in Le Pen having a decent showing? Is this really a Paris versus everybody else election? Well, there is something like this, yes. In the sense that Macron in Paris received something like 34% of the votes. So it was really over-represented. What happens is that you have two geographical areas that really vote for Le Pen. So you have the South of France where I live actually. So that's the traditional right wing region. So they vote for either the Republicans or the National Front massively. And they are more traditional. They are more like the Bible Belt in the US. And you have the North of France near Picardie and near Belgium. That's the equivalent of the Rust Belt in America. And those are former socialists, voters that are switching to Marine Le Pen. And so you have this divide amongst the National Front because they don't have the same ideas, but they coexist. Well, you wrote an article actually a few months back which we recently republished called as Marine Le Pen, the French Donald Trump. And I was wondering if you could just highlight for us. You draw out some pretty significant differences between Le Pen as a candidate and as a movement and Donald Trump and his phenomenon in the US. So talk about the differences, why they're not such a good analogy to each other. Well, so I wrote this one month ago because Donald Trump seemed not to seek for any endorsement from the establishment during the campaign. And definitely that's not the strategy Marine Le Pen thought in the sense that she also tried to attract people more or less from the establishment. Her right arm, for example, Florian Filippo is also from the ENA, the school I told about, Macron went to. So she opened the party to the young people, she really tried to make it more mainstream in a way, more diabolical, as we say in France. But now, obviously now that Trump is elected actually he is getting along pretty well with the establishment. So, well, that's something. But I would say that Marine Le Pen's father wasn't at all in this strategy. He really didn't like political correctness, et cetera. He was, this one was really a fascist type of right-wing politician, but really he didn't want to make any compromises. Well, it was a different thing. And you also point out that Marine Le Pen is a career politician, which I think is a big distinction with Trump. I mean, she's always been around the national front and she's always been in politics and that's how she's made her living. And it's a bigger difference with Macron, actually, because Macron, again, is not a career politician. But she is. Right. He's also young-ish, about 10 years younger than her. He's got this strange situation where he married a much older woman who is his high school teacher. I think this is gonna win him the feminist vote. Well, I don't know. I think compared to America, we don't care as much about family life. It doesn't play as much of a role in French politics as it does here. Right. Well, I'll leave you with one last question on Le Pen. Obviously, you're a great libertarian. You're somebody who's read Mises and Rothbard and Hayek and presumably also read all the French classical liberals and libertarians. You know, what's the response to a disaffected French person who says, I don't like the changes happening for us. I don't like the secularization of French. I don't like the small towns losing their identity. I don't like mass amounts of Muslim immigrants occupying whole neighborhoods in places like Paris. I mean, what's, from a libertarian perspective, we certainly can understand the appeal of Marine Le Pen. How would you respond to someone asking, bringing up these kinds of problems in France? Well, I'm not a politician. So probably it's not to me to answer to this question. There will be two good politicians to do it, if that exists. But maybe just doing things that actually work, I think that one of the big problem with the current situation is that policies were made that just don't work. Holland drastically increased taxation and the size of the state, so did Sarkozy. And now we are in a big financial trouble. And actually the only candidate during the first turn that talked about this is Fillon. But I don't say that he was a libertarian because he wasn't, and he was a prime minister for five years. So why would we trust him? But he was the only one to talk about public debt, the excessive size of the state, et cetera. Marine Le Pen wants to increase the size of the state. And Macron is just more, while we are just going to leave things at ease and just do a European government with a European budget, and we are going to fight fiscal competition. So that was actually one of the worst rate of his program. Well, you bring up an interesting point, which is that there are huge structural problems in France, just like the United States, which maybe can't be solved politically at this point. There's at least not through voting because people will always vote for things that aren't necessarily possible. So thanks for your time, Louis. It's great seeing you, great talking to you. And perhaps we'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks if Marine Le Pen surprises everyone.