The FULL transcription of the video (sorry im french i use google translate) :

Mélenchon: Wages need to be raised; the minimum wage (known as the SMIC in France) must be increased.

[The audience laughs—this takes place during a presidential debate hosted by MEDEF, the association representing France's major business leaders.]

Mélenchon: The minimum wage must be raised! If you don't raise wages, the laughter won't last long, because you'll face a recession. In this country, wages and consumer spending by the general public account for 55% of GDP. So, the laughter will turn sour if you don't share the wealth more equitably.

And let's be clear: small businesses and large corporations are not the same thing. It’s a gathering of magicians here [he is referring to the room full of business leaders, but also to right-wing candidates like Le Pen, Retailleau, Philippe, and Attal, who propose cutting social spending and taxes for the wealthy—though they don't explicitly say so. Incidentally, the business leaders loudly applauded Attal and Philippe, members of Macron's governments that significantly ballooned the national debt through tax handouts to the rich].

You don't want to pay for anything anymore, and you keep passing the buck—but to whom? Who is going to pay for everything you’ve just proposed?

You want a funded pension system? You need a high income to afford a funded plan; to get the same retirement payout we currently get from our pay-as-you-go system, you would have to contribute twice as much as you do now.

The United States is in no position to lecture us. Their social system is abysmal; millions of people are completely cut off from the normal functioning of society. The French people cannot possibly want something like that.

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What if you had a socially-conscious nepo baby (wild idea, I know) with a lot of followers and who doesn't have to work a day in their lives decide to work for a Starbucks or another franchise outlet for a year but in return they demand that all the workers get a major bump in their pay for that year due to the extra foot traffic from that nepo baby working there?

B

I had the misfortune to fire up social media this morning to a BBC article about UK Prime Minister refusing to rule out tax rises in the next budget. Nothing particularly groundbreaking in terms of news.

What caught my attention were the number of comments (from users with job titles like "CEO" and "Board Member", most US-based) that were railing against this prospect and declaring that we should "run the country like a business". This tired viewpoint won't die.

Worse, the top comment compared taxpayers to "customers". *If* you're going to make this comparison, at least be smart enough to realise that tax payers are more equivalent to *shareholders*. It is taxpayers that the Government is meant to create value for and the taxpayers have the ability to remove the Government (managers), if they fail in that responsibility. We don't choose to purchase services from the Government, we *invest* through taxation on earnings in the country to provide services to us and others but expect a return on that investment (in the form of a functioning nation).

The bottom line is that Government works for the taxpayers and is meant to ensure the provision of services (and legal framework in which to operate) in return. We're not passive consumers in this and should be the primary concern/beneficiaries.

Too many drones are convinced that Government should only provide services that *they* need (mentions of cutting foreign aid were numerous). This just seems to be another way to express the "I got mine and I don't want to pay for a penny more", which isn't surprising from those who aspire to be part of the Epstein class.

Running a country like a business invariably means that we envision a model where we pay for what we use. Every trip we take is billed to us per mile travelled. Every day our children spend in school is chargeable. Every trip we make to seek medical attention is payable at a market rate.

It is a dystopian nightmare where your quality of life is directly proportional to your ability to pay and no small amount of luck. We shouldn't settle for it and we shouldn't indulge those who claim it is the way to solve our problems.