“Appealing to morality to denounce France’s debt is not without danger”

2024-12-18 07:30:00

“This issue, deficit and debt, is an issue that poses a moral problem”declared François Bayrou on the steps of the Hôtel de Matignon, during the transfer of power, on 13 December. “Taking your burdens off your children is highly frowned upon, and rightly so. » It is not the first time that the Christian Democrat accuses the public debt of being such « immoral ». It was already discussed during the 2007 presidential campaign ” shame “ and even “dishonor”. An obsession that has never abandoned this man steeped in Christian culture. In it the sinner is a debtor, the Messiah a “Redeemer” (“he who redeems” our debt).

In the Our Father prayer, the basis of the Christian religion, the fifth request is written in Greek like this: “And forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors”which is translated as “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. Forgiveness is therefore assimilated to debt forgiveness. In Aramaic, the language of Christ, it is also the same word for “This” et ” mistake “. This is also the case with the German language “Debt”as Nietzsche points out in Genealogy of morality. However, in Europe, as we know, Germany has, over the decades, imposed its vision of monetary and budgetary issues. In his ordoliberal approach, balance is almost sacred and debt is a disgrace.

In financial demonology the worst devil is public debt. This collective sin is committed to the detriment of “our children”. Many economists have been trying for years to dispel this cliché, putting together the arguments: when we leave a debt as a legacy “to our children”we necessarily leave an equivalent debt as a legacy; it is not our children who pay the debts we contract, but ourselves: the average maturity of public loans is in fact eight years; any recovery through debt leads to an increase in private investment and therefore… increases the wealth bequeathed to our children; future generations will never actually be harmed because the state does it “roll” the debt – repays the loans upon maturity by taking out new loans – and that inflation, little by little, devours it; etc. Nothing helps, the “burden-bequeathed-to-our-children” still haunts politics.