It’s a startling statistic for Western Europeans: While they held about 20 percent of the world’s gross domestic product three years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy predicts that number will shrink to 13 come 2025. That, while the U.S. sees only a two percent decrease to 18 percent.

Many Western European nations operate on an economic model that affords their citizens greater wage equality and leisure time along with the promise of a social safety net to catch the downtrodden.

It’s been described as a more humane way of ordering society. It’s also not working.

Buses are burning and a million people are loudly roaming the streets of France in protest to a new law that allows French employers to fire their workers under age 26 during the first two years of their employment.

To Americans, this sounds pretty standard. We are a culture that generally commends hard work and disparages unnecessary leisure time, unless hard work earned that leisure time. While we have many notable welfare policies in place, most politicians of either big party make sure not to mess with our capitalism too much. It’s sacred in that nationalistic sort of way.

Not so in France. Getting fired used to be difficult until French President Jacques Chirac signed the labor law, titled First Job Contract, into effect. Before the measure, if an employer wanted to fire a poor worker, they had to maneuver through a series of courts, provide documentation of how that worker is a detriment to business, and spend a lot of money in the process.

Compared with all the regulations the French have, it makes America’s system appear to be pure, high-concentrate capitalism. We’re lucky for it.

Economists describe the French system as rigid and unsupportable given the following statistics: In 2003, the French worked an average of 1,431 hours each year, compared with the United States’ 1,822 hours and work-crazed South Korea’s 2,390, the highest. Of those between ages 25-54, about 10 percent do not work; between the ages of 15-25, 24 percent do not work.

Chirac, upon signing the law, said he hopes for a revised, more palpable version to be drafted in the near future. The ultimate goal of the law, to help older workers find jobs and keep them, would not be changed, though. Many French workers like it just how it is, hence the burning buses, marching loudly, etc.

And there’s the hang-up, the snafu. While socialist policies can be used to serve capitalism’s growth, and more importantly, stability, there comes a point when socialist policy begins to drag its own weight when poorly implemented. Worse, the population has tried to lock itself within this admirably-intentioned yet unfeasible economic/social system.

Employers need to be able to fire bad workers — they are bad for business overall and worse for making money. But that doesn’t mean the government has to step in and age discriminate. If a young worker is better than an older worker, they deserve the job more. It’s simply the proper, just way.

In its effort to establish a humane market society, France has discouraged work. It’s not that socialism is bad policy — no one knows that question since full implementation of the system has never been successful on a national level. Rather, France’s policies are clumsy and without the flexibility required in an increasingly globalized society.

The country’s growth rate has risen only 1.6 percent annually over the last four years, a telling sign that dramatic policy changes are necessary for France to not only preserve its economic relevance, but also its long-term vitality as a socially relevant nation.

In the meantime, perhaps the U.S. will take one of France’s cues: According the the CIA Factbook on the United States, “Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households.”