France needs Greece more than Greece needs France. So long as the Greeks grab the headlines with their defense of their unreformed economy, no one seems to notice that France is in violation of EU rules on the size of the allowed deficit, has such sustained high-level unemployment that its young people have joined successful hedge fund manager Jean-Christophe Napoleon Bonaparte in seeking their futures in perfidious Albion, and that its government is increasing its direct involvement in the aircraft, energy, and auto industries to deter foreigners, maintain over-manning, and prevent challenges to its limit of the work week to 35 hours. With those moves to its credit, and an economy suffering as a consequence, France wants to export its rules to America. The European Union has imposed on Google the so-called “right to be forgotten”, which requires Google to destroy refrerences, and links to those references, when requested to do so by people who claim a reason to want to airbrush their pasts. Some 250,000 requests were honored, some one million links disabled in the first year of the “right”. Chacun à son goût. Unless the gout is that of a successful American techno-giant. French authorities are now insisting that Google expand this newly discovered “right” to the search engine’s websites worldwide, an extraterritorial reach Google is resisting. Can a demand that we adopt the 35-hour week be far behind? That would certainly improve the competitiveness of the French economy, no reforms required.
