Still more about money

This is the third of a series of five articles.  The author is a well-known twentieth-century expatriate American.  At the end of the series, I will reveal his name.  In the meantime, feel free to comment or to guess who the author is.

One of the funny things is that when there is great deal of unemployment you can never get any one to do any work.  It was true in England it is true in America and it is now true in France.  Once unemployment is recognized as unemployment and organized as unemployment nobody starts to work.  If you are out of work and you find some work then you go to work.  But if you are part of the unemployed then you are part of that, and if work comes you have to change your position from the unemployed to the employed, and then perhaps you will have to change back again, so perhaps you had better just stay where you are.

That is what happens.

We have given up trying to employ french people, those who were not working were unemployed and that was no way of changing them back to work, so we took to Indo-Chinamen.  Indo-Chinamen are after all frenchmen, so finally they too became part of the unemployed.  I asked one of them, his name is Trac, and why don’t any of you stay in a job when you get it.  Why he said it’s like this.  They get ten francs a day as unemployed.  Now a Chinaman can live on five francs a day and that gives him five francs to gamble.  The rest of the time he puts on his hat and goes out.  He takes a temporary job, which still leaves him unemployed, and buys a new suit of clothes.  Then by and by he catches cold, he goes to a hospital, free, and then he dies, and has a free coffin.  All the Indo-Chinamen in Indo-China want to come to Paris to live like that.  They call that living like frenchmen.

Everybody has to think about the unemployed getting to be that and is there any way to stop them.  Everybody has to think about that.

If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.  Fnord.