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|5.25.06 @ 8:43AM|#
...and governments unable to break free from stifling state regulation of an increasingly outdated economy...
France has two economies; one does quite well.
The CPE, in turn, was a ham-fisted, flawed, but also understandable stab at trying to introduce flexibility into the rigid French labor market. It was a modest endeavor (so much so that the body representing French employers refused to endorse it) that would have permitted employers to terminate the employment of workers under the age of 26, without any reason, or notice, within their first two years of being hired.
Its demise (like the demise of a similar measure under Mitterand) was completely predictable. Why? Because such laws pit various groups against one another. On the one hand you have this large class of protected workers, folks of an older generation mostly, and on another hand you have young workers who are supposed to carry the brunt of any reform. It is Hayek's nightmare come true - though not only in France.
Charles de Gaulle and his successors, particularly Francois Mitterrand and Chirac, understood that only an anchor in Europe could salvage a declining France. Only in the context of a unified continent would the country be able to punch above its weight.
This merely begs the question: how important is the ghost of de Gaulle to French public these days? The man has been dead for over three decades now and Chirac is going to leave office next year.
In such confusing times, the country has tended to simply change its constitution.
Yes and no. More often than not there has simply been the appearance of change.
For France to untie its myriad knots, the solution may require replacing the Fifth Republic with a Sixth.
Or the next election.
|5.25.06 @ 8:47AM|#
Anyway, I think Segolene Royal, who has some Blair-like "New Labour" tendencies (though they aren't mirror images of each other certainly), would make for an interesting French President.
|5.26.06 @ 9:29AM|#
Whatever you say, M Bart! Nobody ever put into doubt your deep knowledge of everything French, really, man!
BTW, why the new nom de plume? It seems quite strange that the author of 'A Confutation of Atheism' would appeal to our Gunnells, he who was a proud paragon of "hard atheism", doesn't it? Or, is it rather because of the fact that 'Bentley was self-assertive and presumptuous, and made enemies as a result?'
|5.26.06 @ 12:04PM|#
What's the difference between a president and a prime minister? Why do they have both?