http://www.nysun.com/article/66884
I can’t ever remember being prouder of the French government than I am of my own, but I freakin’ love their president. He absolutely refused to cave in to pressure from his country’s large socialist base, and now the union strikes are collapsing. Why can’t we have leaders with that kind of balls?
Thatcher stood up against the garbage-men unions in Britain, Reagan did the same with the air-traffic controllers. The fact that they stood up to them and won was a symbol of the changed public attitudes toward unions. I don’t know about French politics to know if this is France’s turn. I hope it is.
From this IHT article, it appears that Sarkozy isn’t what he was cracked up to be. He wants to remove ads from state-run TV and have a new tax (on mobile phones and internet connections) to get equivalent revenue. The article suggests that this is not all, he has other statist measures up his sleeve:
In the 45-minute speech, Sarkozy declared the death of the 35-hour week, suggested that large companies may have to double or triple the part of their profit they are obliged to share with employees and vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare that he has commissioned from two Nobel laureates in economics, Amarthya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. He also said that he would put a state bank in charge of defending French industry against sovereign wealth funds and other financial predators.
Well, I guess we all knew deep down that anything good coming out of France, politically speaking, was just a fantasy. :wub: