Posted on 06/10/2005 5:47:43 AM PDT by OESY
...At a time of deep national unease, his appointment is President Chirac's Hail Mary pass, a final, desperate heave to salvage a fast evaporating mandate....
At the foreign ministry, he traveled relentlessly and became notorious for his tirades against his staff, calling them "fools," "nothings" and "incompetents." European diplomats were frustrated by his indifference to Brussels and could only watch as he took on hairier problems like the disintegrating Ivory Coast, where he felt France could make a difference. While Mr. Chirac merely spoke of France being a genuine counterweight to American power, it was Mr. de Villepin who tried to make it happen. He is a pure mandarin, clean, brutal and diabolically effective, with the sulfur about him. As interior minister for the past year, he went about his business quietly, developing allies among the secret services....
Mr. de Villepin has made reducing unemployment his priority and said "nothing is off-limits" when it comes to ideas for reform. Except, of course, anything derived from Britain or America. He has no patience with the views of France's business class, and those on the right led by Mr. Sarkozy, that France's fate is an Anglo-Saxon social and economic model. In a newspaper interview on Sunday, he dismissed the British and American "workfare" model saying that if France was looking for a country to follow, Denmark was the one. "It's a question of giving businesses more freedom to hire, while guaranteeing security for employees...."
Regardless of the next few months, at 51, Mr. de Villepin could have a long political future ahead of him.... [I]n his book "Eloge des Voleurs de Feu," a tribute to poets, he approvingly quotes the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: "I know I am becoming too big for myself. Someone else stubbornly wants to burst out of me."....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Eurocrats still don't get it. You can't have "freedom to hire" an employee without the corresponding freedom to fire one. On the Continent today, hiring somebody practically means adopting him as a dependent. Yet they wonder why nobody wants to expand a business or start a new one.
Sooner or later Europe has to undergo a Reagan/Thatcher type revolution, but right now the intellectual base for it just isn't there.
We are not far behind. It is already true in the government and companies with unions. That is one of the things which keeps our government growing and decreases our competitiveness globally.
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