French Finance Minister: Stop thinking while I sell this tax cut
Writes the New York Times in its Sunday edition, France's government under Nicolas Sarkozy seeks to shift emphasis away from intellectualism and towards "working hard" with the hopes of getting rich.
Says Finance Minister Christine Lagarde: "Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves."
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Excerpts:
Ms. Lagarde knows well the Horatio Alger story of making money through hard work. She looked west to make her fortune, spending much of her career as a lawyer at the firm of Baker & McKenzie, based in the American city identified by its broad shoulders and work ethic: Chicago. She rose to become the first woman to head the firm’s executive committee and was named one of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes magazine.
So now, two years back in France, she is a natural to promote the program of Mr. Sarkozy, whose driving force is doing rather than musing, and whose mantra is “work more to earn more.”
“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said [philosoper-journalist Bernard-Henri] Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases. I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not."
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The entire New York Times article can be read HERE.
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