And that piece of trash was written by a bunch of unelected, unaccountable elitists many of whom prefer to speak french. The irony is that the French rejected this marxist trash because it was not leftist enough to convince them that they could manipulate Brussels enough to protect their socialist preferments when they are threatened by globalization. The preferment du jure are the preferments in the form of agricultural subsidies which unequally favor the French over the Brits and which subsidize a sector which accounts for only 2% of employment while sucking down 40% of the EU budget.
Without the farm susidies, the rebate to the British would be unecessary, certainly negotiable. But, like most budget squabbles, this quarrel is really over values and power or rather the budget battles reflect the reality below and supply the language and metaphor for those stuggles.
In this budget battle, Chirac wants the political process to select a favored class (in this case French farmers) and to redistribute to them wealth taxed from a less favored group (in this case British and Dutch mercantile class). Blair is tacitly (one must guard one's speech in socialist Europe) saying that it is the market and not a parliament which should determine the prosperity of these groups.
To us Americans this is a no-brainer: Of course the market must allocate resources. In the age of globalization, there is no option but to keep the economy as lean and mean as possible or the Asians will be redistributing our wealth for us. So we say that with this philosophy, Chirac is courting a crack-up in the real world of international competition. Let us acknowledge a caveat before we choke on our own righteousness, America is not without sin in this temptation to jigger market allocations with class politics, witness Bush's own recent farm subsidies. Bush is our conservative champion, the good guy, but his administration has abandoned any restraints of States' Rights in granting federal subsidies to local education; it has endorsed the New Deal/Great Socity conception of Federal activism with its Prescription Drug program, creating a new entitlement for a class (the elderly) without even a means test. In doing so, God knows how much we will have distorted the market for pharmecuticals.
So in making our judgments about European socialism, we Americans must be circumspect and more than a little humble lest we be dismissed for hypocracy. The best we can say is that we are talking about differences of degree here. We tend to be less socialistic and more free market oriented than the French, and the Brits tend to fall in between.
But just because our virtue is not entirely pristine does not mean we cannot make some valid judgments against French gamesmanship. In essence we and the French are playing a different game but we don't get the rules.
To a Frenchman, the game is not to be won within the rules, the game is to write the rules. We like to think we share with the British a sentiment and a committment to the addage that, "it is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game." To a Frenchman the notion of "sportsmanship" is naive and dangerous. The world is rigged against him and all games, (read, all endeavors,) are inherently unfair. Only a sheep would submit to a shearing. A Frenchman is no fool and he will never conscent to be manipulated by a system which, no doubt, has already been manipulated by an Englishman.
In this cynacism, the Frenchman is really only a figure for the whole of the Left. In countless examples from the French Revolution through the absuridites of feminism, the Kafkaesque Cultural Revolution, and even to the EU Constitution, the Left has invariably sought to have its way with the world by changing the rules of the game. Again, we Americans are not without sin.
Consider, as one example, how the Left has changed the rules of the game at home by distorting the Constitution, the document which codifies those rules, and standing it on its head. To do this, the Left forum shops, seeking liberal judges. Liberal judges in turn, abandon origonal intent and invent meanings like privacy and wilfully ignore the plain language, like reservations of rights to the people and the states. Worse, liberal judges go beyond the written set of rules and expand the Constitution to include new rules called foreign laws. The document, and therefore the rules which govern us, has been rendered so plastic and malleable that the commerce clause can now be invoked to justify any federal activity, as Justice Thomas has recently despairingly concluded in dissent. The process has gone so far that the left has not just suceeded in overcoming the Constitution when it rules act as a shield against their schemes but now they have suceeded in perverting it and using it as a sword to achieve their ends in legalising universal, unfettered abortion. Truly, the game was to write the rules of the game.
In repudiating the EU constitution, the French socialists and fellow travelers have made a tactical error, perhaps a strategic error, in misjudging the potential offered in such a ponderous document for rule jiggering and other mischief. But the game is not over. The Left in Europe cannot alter its behavior any more than Hillary can become a patriot Unless God in his misterous ways visits an epiphany upon the lot of them the French and Hillary will keep on doing what they do.
Round two is about to begin and now the Germans will step on stage and they will tip this affair one way or the other.
