Lessons from the Nationalzation Nation: State-Owned Enterprises in France
Cohen, Paul
POLITICS ABROAD Lessons from the Nationalization Nation State-Owned Enterprises in France PAUL COHEN With a steep recession in full swing, it’s French-bashing time again on the...
...This is the land of suffocating bureaucracy and high taxes, inefficient nationalized industries and an enormous taxpayer-subsidized public sector, disruptive strikes and guaranteed life employment...
...There is a touch of France in its “étatisme”—the state as all-embracing solution rather than problem—and there’s more than a touch of France in the bash-the-rich righteousness with which the new president cast his plans...
...This France is in large part an imaginary place...
...If the French model is going to be dragged into the debate over American economic policy and held up as proof that state planning is doomed to failure, let’s get the model right...
...If, as New...
...great with wine and seduction, but when it comes to the hardnosed business of business, not entrepreneurial or hardworking enough...
...He held it out as the alternative to the laissez-faire ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher...and its record is pretty dismal...
...subject to European Union competition and trade rules stricter than American regulations, it is sufficiently attractive to global capital to make it the third leading recipient of foreign direct investment (ahead of Germany and China...
...As the Obama administration frantically weighed policy options, pundits agonized over the prospect of the U.S...
...For Leonhardt, 1980s France offers a cautionary tale for American policy makers: “Mitterrand made the nationalization of some banks and heavy industry the centerpiece of his agenda...
...its workers are more productive per hour than their American counterparts and less unionized (in 2003, 12.4 percent of eligible workers in the United States were unionized, while only 8.3 percent in France were...
...France today boasts the fifth-largest manufacturing economy in the world...
...The coup de grâce came with Roger Cohen’s [no relation to the author] op-ed in the New York Times, “One France Is Enough...
...America, Cohen intoned, needs to draw from its own entrepreneurial, can-do spirit to find its own way: “I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States...
...Home to the world’s fifth-largest stock exchange, France, with its vaunted engineering schools, has dispatched armies of math whizzes and economists into New York and London investment banks to invent the trading strategies and exotic derivatives that helped get us into the current mess...
...POLITICS ABROAD Lessons from the Nationalization Nation State-Owned Enterprises in France PAUL COHEN With a steep recession in full swing, it’s French-bashing time again on the editorial pages and in the business sections of American newspapers...
...inhabited by the fun-loving French...
...For better or worse, “socialist” France is fully integrated into the global capitalist economy...
...government’s taking stakes in banks, and automakers contemplated France with a mix of horror and resignation...
...When, last February, the Washington Post dared a tentative endorsement of government takeovers, it did so apologetically, reassuring its readers that it shared their distaste for Gallic planning: “We can understand why talk of bank nationalization freaks out the stock market: The very notion is so, well, French...
...Atop Leonhardt’s ash heap of history lay a triptych of state-engineered dystopias: Lenin’s totalitarian nightmare, Hugo Chávez’s oil-fueled tragicomedy, and last but not least “the folly of Mitterrand...
...The New York Times’s economics columnist David Leonhardt called for temporary nationalizations, but he took pains to distinguish them from the nefarious takeovers inflicted by leftist ideologues...
...The France to which these writers gesture is immediately recognizable to American eyes...
...Cohen confessed that the Obama budget “made me a little queasy...
...too wedded to their long vacations, short workweeks, and early retirements, and too addicted to generous handouts from a bloated welfare state to cut it...
...France’s economy staggered through the 1980s, as government-run banks backed political pet projects that didn’t work out...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
