France --> America --> France ?

I thought this was a really interesting Op-Ed from the New York Times about France and America.
Not only can one make the argument that America is trying to become France but also France is trying to become America. Watching what Sarkozy wants to do with the University system reminds me of American Universities. I think that there are MANY problems with the French education system and I'm so thankful that I was able to get my education in America -- given my learning style and career goals. However, there are also so many problems with the American Education system. Anyway, my thoughts are not very organized right now so I'll just leave you with the article :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/opinion/05Cohen.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

March 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
One France Is Enough
By ROGER COHEN

WASHINGTON

The French writer François Mauriac once said during the cold war that he loved Germany so much, he was glad there were two of them. After what an undivided Germany had done to France in World War II and before, that was understandable.

To paraphrase Mauriac, I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States.

Don’t get me wrong, I think President Obama’s counter-revolution goes in the right direction. In fact, it’s less a question of right and wrong with his budget than of necessity. After the excesses of Reagan-inspired deregulation and the disaster that unfettered markets have delivered, the pendulum had to swing.

Still, the $3.6 trillion Obama budget made me a little queasy. 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 as “a threat to the status quo in Washington.”

Of course, the budget proposal represents a maximalist position that Congress will claw back. Obama knows that. Still there was something breathtaking about the scope of the president’s targets and ambitions. For everyone from the oil and gas industry to drug companies, the message was clear: Off with their heads!

I’d thought of Obama as less Robespierre than Talleyrand. I still think he’s more bridge-building centrist than revolutionary. He needs to be. Money has never been more fungible than today.

Punish capital and it will punish you by saying, “Hasta la vista!” The former French President François Mitterrand learned that a little over a quarter-century ago when, after an initial wave of nationalizations, he reversed course.

Obama, too, will have to adjust and make trade-offs, while keeping his eye on core goals, like bringing health coverage to the country’s 45 million uninsured. As he does so, he should be careful to guard America’s spirit, without which recovery will stall.

I lived for about a decade, on and off, in France and later moved to the United States. Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery.

Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.

Churn is the American way. Companies are born, rise, fall and die. Others come along to replace them. The country’s remarkable capacity for innovation, for reinvention, is tied to its acceptance of failure. Or always has been. Without failure, the culture of risk fades. Without risk, creativity withers. Save the zombies and you sabotage the vital.

If America loses sight of these truths, it will cease to be itself.

When the Big Three automakers, their heads in the sand, have made the wrong models with the wrong technologies for years, while their competitors adapted, I think it’s inevitable that one — probably Chrysler — must pay the price. Bankruptcy is not necessarily the same as liquidation.

I know, this is an exceptional moment. Decidedly the “Decider” delivered a debacle. President Obama, its recipient, sometimes resembles the trustee-in-chief of national bankruptcy proceedings. Hope is on hold.

Trillions are the new billions and because 80 is the new 70, or so we are led to believe, you will get to live longer to witness where all the debt accumulated by throwing money into the bottomless pit of A.I.G., and its cohorts in leveraged fleecing, leaves the country.

We are told that the collapse of A.I.G. would pose a “systemic risk,” but it would be a tonic to my particular system if someone in the Obama administration could explain why in plain language.

The battle lines are being drawn. Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, said of the Democrats: “As they try to pull us in the direction of government-dominated Europe, we’re going to have to fight as never before to make sure that America stays America.”

Romney’s got it upside-down. The Republicans under Bush destroyed the American economy and what America stood for in the world. But that does not change the fact that Obama, in his restorative counter-revolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation.

Greek tragedy holds that hubris, or overweening pride, leads inexorably to nemesis, divine judgment and at the last may usher in utter destruction. The United States is in full post-Bush nemesis. In its core values, un-Gallicized, lies the long road to redemption.