2. Secondly, to link growth to the public levy, which is subject by common agreement to two rules.

• The public levy is the sum of taxes and new public debts. Securities acquired through insurance premiums and pension contributions are excluded.

Some of these acquisitions are part of the compulsory levies. Subscriptions to public debt securities may also be part of the compulsory levies. Public levies and compulsory levies are nevertheless two different realities and therefore, in good econometrics, two distinct aggregates.

• Linking growth firstly to the direct placements of savings in capital implies reducing or stabilizing the public levy. Reducing, when over-indebtedness and other drifts have made this levy exponential; stabilizing, once the path to full employment is (again) clear.

When reduction is called for, expecting the exit from crisis only from this reduction is often neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not necessary as long as there are savings to place, or to redirect, into capital. It is not sufficient when it diverts from removing the obstacles to those placements and redirections.

• A government obliged to reduce the public levy has the duty to explain before and while it acts in that direction. But this duty is one of the hardest to fulfill, particularly in a country where the dominant mentality has led to exponential over-indebtedness.

The explanation bears, indeed, on what a national economy in good health is. Action concentrates first, let us repeat, on removing the obstacles to the direct placements of savings in capital. The preparation that puts a nation in a position to succeed at this exercise can prove very long, while being punctuated by contradictory turns.

• The reduction of the public levy succeeds only in relative value of the sum of the incomes from labor and from placements. This is why this success is the more likely the more the stimulus through direct placements of savings in capital is activated as a priority, should it prove to be obstructed.

The neglect of this possibility of stimulus has its reasons. Not disturbing established allocations of power is one of them. Financial intermediation strengthens some powers and weakens others. The same goes for self-financing through undistributed earnings.

• “Should job creation be ensured first of all by your direct placements in new shares of capital?” A referendum on this question seeks a mandate delivered by universal suffrage to its elected representatives.

If yes wins decisively, the order is given to make additional public levy only a temporary and complementary means of stimulus. All the more so since polls confirm that this yes remains clearly in the majority; successive governments are inclined to stick to the usual general management of this levy. But is the question posed too technical or too insidious to be put to universal suffrage?

• “First of all” and “firstly” do not mean “exclusively.” And “secondly” — linking growth secondly to the public levy subjected by common agreement… — means neither “incidentally” nor “optionally.”

Pretending that employment does not depend first of all on targeted collective action is a denial of reality. That this action must concern the birth and growth of enterprises is obvious. That its first point of application is the financing of these births and growths is common sense. That this financing should be done, secondarily, only through credit seems, at first sight, hard to make consensual. But what is the aim? If the aim is to reach the largest possible number of open-ended jobs, this objective is more likely attained through financing of enterprises that is itself mainly open-ended — mainly through capital, secondarily, let us repeat, through credit.

• A public levy adrift necessarily has, as its cause, a failing national economic understanding, does it not? Is it not the same if there is more unemployment than in a neighboring country?

By managing to agree on what a national economy in good health principally is, political parties and unions address to the whole country a prescription of common understanding. This prescription can then be made more relevant through public discussion of what it requires. The aptitude for full employment of a country where freedom of labor prevails, and that country's mastery of its public levy, are so substantially interdependent, beneficial, and collective that it is calamitous to want them ideologically stamped.

• Freedom of labor implies freedom of enterprise. Exposure to a shortage of open-ended jobs is inherent in these freedoms, which are but one.

Mastery of the public levy reduces this exposure by letting more private financing devote itself to the birth and growth of enterprises, in a fiscal environment that this mastery makes it possible to stabilize, or even to lighten beforehand. The job creation resulting from this additional financing in turn contributes to this mastery. The latter may, however, have been so far lost that it cannot be regained without first making the financing of the birth and growth of enterprises more attractive.

• Step back far enough, and it becomes obvious. Freedom of labor exposes one to a shortage of work as little as possible, on two conditions.

One falls to enterprises: paying dividends on average markedly higher than the interest rates on savings accounts. The other falls to public authority: its mastery of the levy it operates. Both are under the sway of national understanding and, in Europe, under the common denominator of national understandings. Freedom of labor is part of these understandings, though it is uncertain that eliminating exposure to a shortage of work by abrogating this freedom no longer has any advocates. Let us also doubt that flexibilizing employment and securing career paths are in truth the “firstly” and the “secondly” of reducing this exposure. The continual increases in this flexibilization and this securing are no more sustainable than those of the public levy, whereas those of the stock of capital and of wages are. France will remain haunted by the fear of its decline as long as a significant number of its most prominent economists, editorialists, politicians, and union leaders do not persistently share with it the two conditions for the full enjoyment of freedom of labor and intelligent explanations bound up with their interdependence¹⁰⁸. If this is done, this doctrine of virtuous growth will also be a contribution to Europe's strengthening of its federating impulse.

• The two rules for managing the public levy have, respectively, as their object public investment and the most important budgetary result. Each of these two rules is the subject of the two following sections.