David Lisnard is mayor of Cannes, chairman of the supervisory board of the Simone Veil hospital in Cannes and vice-chairman and spokesperson for the AMF.
The road to servitude is paved with good statist intentions.
And punctuated by bureaucratic decisions which succeed in being at the same time contradictory, ineffective and alienating.
This is not new, Tocqueville, Bastiat, Aron and so many others of our French thinkers - often genius - of freedom, which it is urgent to have (re) read in all classes, have always alerted us on the potential abuses of modern administration.
The state is the condition of our protection, but in its rightful place.
While collective prosperity and security have historically been accompanied in our Western societies by the fulfillment of the virtuous couple of the values of freedom and responsibility, everything is done in our time of "nanny state" to infantilize individuals, hinder initiatives, encyst society.
Citizenship dies, group dynamics suffers and the effectiveness of public policies is lost.
The obese state loses the sovereign authority for which it was invented.
Because by dint of moving away from the essential role of the State and producing abstruse norms, laws and regulations recede in their legitimacy, are inapplicable or take an arbitrary character in their execution, and the obese State loses the regal authority for which it was invented, and which we so lack today.
This phenomenon can appear elsewhere in the world but it is pushed to its paroxysm in France.
Compulsory deductions (taxes and charges) with 45% of the wealth produced and public expenditure - 56% of GDP before the current situation and its “whatever the cost” - are the highest on the planet, and decreed standards pile up and have long exceeded that of the kinds of cheese in the country, making it even more ungovernable by wanting to direct it in all its depths and nooks and crannies.
This administrative infernal spiral is neither specific to this government nor to this period, but is fruitful with this particularly enarchic power of which the Covid crisis reveals the absurd matrix.
If for Eugène Delacroix, freedom guides the people, the health crisis that we are going through gives the rulers the opportunity to guide our freedom through what they consider to be "good for the people", according to procedures and measures issued by a few. ingenious minds of a high administration never as productive as when it comes to laying down binding standards and regulations.
The technocratic king Ubu is having a blast right now, depriving us of freedom, and therefore of responsibility, to the detriment of an effective fight against the covid 19 epidemic, and destroying a significant part of the economy, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and beyond which means that life is not only biological but also social, spiritual and human.
This administrative drift is revealed in broad daylight during the health crisis through the shortages of what is essential and the excess of what is bureaucratic.
We do not manage, unlike many more efficient countries in the face of the epidemic, to test, screen, diagnose methodically?
Rigorously isolate the contagious?
Systematically back-tracing the week preceding the onset of symptoms to break the chains of contamination?
Provide the hospital with sufficient human and material resources?
Control barrier gestures in closed sites open to the public, including large commercial areas?
Sanction establishments that do not comply with the protection rules (throughout the summer I unsuccessfully reported a small number to the State, which alone in France is empowered to sanction)?
Define scenarios for the potential evolution of the disease, which since June had been exposed, in several levels of risk, to anticipate rules and protocols by business, graduated according to epidemiological hypotheses?
So the state Leviathan, as omnipotent as it is powerless, takes every week measures after measures, as general as they are impossible to rigorously enforce, generating confusion, causing incomprehension and injustices, restricting freedoms and paralyzing the responsibility which can only be individual. .
This administrative drift is revealed in broad daylight during the health crisis through the shortages of what is essential and the excesses of what is bureaucratic, including the waltz of certificates and self-certificates allowing people to travel which sets our country apart, making each of us a Mr. K at the foot of the castle, but also by the powerlessness of the State in the face of those who do not respect the essential rules.
As too often, unable to suppress the minority of those who cheat and harm, the state penalizes the vast majority of those who care to respect the rules, to the point of the madness of measures against commercial activity during the "reconfinement". "Which by egalitarianism have led to closing supermarket shelves so that they do not sell the products of shops which are themselves prevented from opening in spite of sanitary and economic good sense ...
" Anything that increases freedom, increases responsibility ”
wrote Victor Hugo.
Giving traders the freedom to open their businesses also means making them responsible and controlling them if necessary to ensure that this responsibility is well understood and that everyone's safety is indeed guaranteed.
But how can we decently estimate that it is dangerous to go for a haircut or to buy a pair of shoes, a shirt or a book in a store that would only bring in a limited number of customers with gauges adapted to the surface? and controlled, which would respect physical distancing and mask wearing, etc.
and at the same time consider that shopping in a large crowded area or taking the metro does not present any risk of contamination?
Today we know the places at high risk of contamination.
Work from Stanford University published in the journal
Nature
confirms them.
Logically, they are the ones who welcome the densest audiences, during the most time, and with fewer possibilities to apply barrier measures, such as when the mask has to be removed to consume.
This in-depth knowledge of the disease and the conditions in which the virus spreads makes it possible to establish protocols and to require health materials adapted to the activities and circumstances.
Each sector and each level of alert can and must correspond to a level of predefined and anticipated rules, with as a last resort only the ban on opening the most risky establishments.
This is how we empower and reduce the uncertainty of business leaders, better protect against contagion and defend the economy and employment.
The millefeuille continues to increase in an indigestible way, unfortunately with our taxes.
In the same register of the politico-administrative madness observed in recent weeks, we await with vexation the “sub-prefects for the revival”, fresh out of the schools of the State civil service, that the Prime Minister has decided to deploy on "The territories" from January to explain to business leaders how to work (finally those who will have the right and will be survivors, especially among traders and in the tourism and events sector, the first creator of wealth and jobs in France and great sacrifice of the period).
These additional officials will also either be useless or bypass the work of the prefects and sub-prefects in place, already made more complex all year round by the action of the DREAL, ARS and other regional state entities.
The millefeuille continues to increase in an indigestible way, unfortunately with our taxes.
A few examples among many others of the absurdities observed allow us to grasp the chaos that governs us.
Last March, it emerged from initial studies, following in particular the case of the Canton restaurant, that the virus can be transmitted by aerosols.
This results in the relevance of wearing a mask in closed collective places;
we then distribute masks to all the inhabitants of the commune and the central power, bent on the management of the shortage and its moral sufficiency proportional to its material insufficiencies, denounces, ironizes, sometimes even attacks in court the local initiatives which all take place. are found to be relevant.
In what other democracy is a mayor so hampered in the exercise of his reasonable responsibilities by the state?
Also in the spring, faced with the incapacities of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Ministry of Health, and in response to appeals for help from caregivers in the public sector as well as liberal professionals (despised by ministers and senior officials since only the hospital, moreover neglected for years, and the famous number 15, were offered to patients), we provide doctors and health establishments (hospitals and clinics) with masks, gowns, charlottes, overshoes, protective glasses, even thermometers.
First of all - before doing it publicly to challenge public opinion and make things happen - we do it in secret!
With scenes worthy of Twist again in Moscow.
Because it was important not to say it, so that the hospitals supplied by us (establishments, let us remember, under the responsibility of the Ministry of Health) do not see themselves punished by this State which was failing in its mission, where our cells municipal purchasing authorities were able to procure equipment.
I will not come back here to the peregrinations of health protocols applying to schools, and to the great moments of solitude felt with the members of the Academy Inspectorate and the municipal services in charge of canteens and extracurricular activities.
All decrees and orders for the application of erratic national measures reach us after their supposed date of application: this is true each time for the provisions concerning markets, businesses, and all the restrictions accompanying the various regulatory phases known as confinement, deconfinement, reconfinement, in a stop and go practiced in an emergency, which on the one hand reveals the total lack of preparation since the end of the first wave of the government, on the other hand generates a permanent uncertainty degrading, anxiety-provoking and more destructive to the economy that the risk faced.
The “mayor-prefect” couple, whose ears have been turned down, is a fiction in the management of this crisis.
Do the French know that the “mayor-prefect” couple, whose ears have been turned down, is a fiction in the management of this crisis?
That the prefects themselves discover the government measures on television?
That the mayors are still not informed by the State of the clusters in their municipalities!
Data transmission is almost nil and random depending on the departments, districts and people.
It is as president of the supervisory board of the hospital, also thanks to the municipal scientific watch and the transversal working group that I set up on February 24, bringing together representatives of city medicine, the hospital public, clinics, laboratories, that I can constitute an international, national and especially local dashboard of the evolution of the epidemic, with indicators that prove to be more reliable and above all faster, which is essential, than what we learn through official communications.
But let no one be mistaken.
The evil is not cyclical, linked to the astonishment that the pandemic continues to produce among our leaders.
This bureaucratic absurdity which hinders and slows down, slows down and discourages, sometimes to the point of preventing creative action, we experience it in our town halls or companies all the time, and increasingly in recent decades.
The fault is not due to the health crisis, it is simply more apparent in circumstances which demand speed, simplicity, clarity, serenity, authority.
Authority and freedom are often wrongly opposed.
In today's France, it is the lack of state authority over the necessary rules that leads it to deprive us of our freedom with unnecessary prohibitions.
Montesquieu formulated it so well:
"unnecessary laws weaken necessary laws."
The former infantilize us, alienate us and impoverish us while the latter protect us, liberate us and emancipate us.
The state protects less and less and prohibits more and more.
However, the state protects less and less and prohibits more and more.
It discourages honest citizens and by its regal weakness involuntarily leaves room for gangs, groups, sometimes mafias.
This infernal spiral which deprives us of freedom is the cause and the consequence of a civic decline, since civicism is precisely the exercise of the responsibility of each one, therefore of his freedom which is its symmetrical condition, in the public space. .
The thunderous and often victimizing indignation on social networks or in the media replace the mature participation in the life of the city, the noise replaces the praxis like the Manichean hysteria the critical reason, the moods of comfort replace the demanding and argued questions. of our leaders.
They themselves, national governors and senior officials, yet very often honest and competent, are the first agents of the fall of the essential civic pillar of our society.
The causes are the functionarisation of the main officials of the Executive and their intellectual and behavioral connivance with the senior administration, none having lived in the risk economy, the perverse judicialization of their action which leads them to protect themselves by a umbrella of maximalist measures, the lack of imagination that characterizes them, the practice of power based on the combination of political communication and centralized administrative practice, which moves away from constant, evaluated and adjusted action.
We will have to get out of it, as these policies are leading the country to failure, including democratic ones, by opening the way to the merchants of demagogic adventures from extremists of all stripes.
Because conformism feeds what Raymond Aron called "revolutionaryism", which is expressed everywhere today and in many forms.
We must quickly become aware of this serious reality and find common sense, by a new decentralization, a political renewal at the top of the executive with personalities more able to take care of the execution of things, a profound reform of the State, its scope, its objectives, its human resources, its assessment, its management, its control.
This approach is essential for the best performance of our public policies, but beyond that to oxygenate society, allow creative forces to express themselves better, to better repress those who destroy, and finally to empower and liberate.
For a government, guaranteeing freedom is also knowing how to show courage.
However, it seems that under the guise of health protection for the French, our leaders seek to protect themselves by no longer taking the slightest decision that would require considering that the art of governing is something other than the art of governance. 'to prohibit.
The State must regain a sense of proportion and correctness in order to reconcile the necessary health protection and the essential economic and social freedom which connects us to each other.
It is about our conception of society and our national cohesion.
By losing sight of this requirement, our leaders arouse mistrust.
Up to what consequences?