JLFers know that I think the Weekly Standard, helmed by friend Bill Kristol and good friend Fred Barnes, is one of the best sources around for coverage of national and international politics. In the most-recent issue I read, this quality shone through in a fascinating piece about the Italian elections by Christopher Caldwell and in a masterful Robert Leiken account of the French protests, which is not online and deserves a lengthy quotation:
Gallic reason has succumbed to French revolutionary reaction. At length President Jacques Chirac, who withstood U.S. pressure on Iraq, surrendered to marching unions, students, and radical sects, and withdrew the modest labor-law reform his government had backed in an effort to create jobs. The marchers thus have secured for their country economic stagnation and political paralysis. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has blown his scripted Reagan/Thatcher moment from which he was to have emerged strengthened by a duel with the unions. Instead, France’s conservative leaders must sit, fingers-crossed, hoping vainly that the volatile second and third-generation immigrant suburbs ? now deprived of even the slim promise of a shot at stable employment held out by the cashiered labor reform ? will not burn again.
I stood in the Paris rain and watched the ghosts march. The walking museum exhibited every brand of revolutionary familiar in another life: Trotskyites distributed leaflets announcing “world revolution.” Class struggle (la lutte des classes) got major poster board. Adorned with hammer and sickle, red flags stood out against black anarchist banners vowing “Death!” to “Capital” and “Democracy.” Followers of Mao Zedong and Lyndon LaRouche strolled with aging militants of the French Communist party. Lyc?e students in Ch? Guevara T-shirts ambled alongside grey-bearded Sorbonne professors chanting slogans from the Spanish Civil War. Blimps hoisted by labor unions dawdled above plump public employees. Causes and ideas that were young in 19th-century Europe had escaped from their nursing homes in Pyongyang, Havana, and Minsk. The marchers in their millions around the country would soon be celebrating victory, but when viewed from the standpoint of economics and history, they had joined a funeral procession.
On the other hand, most of the economics writing in the Weekly Standard verges on the dreaful. This Irvin Stelzer piece in the same issue is a good example of the badness. Among other things, he argues that workers have just as much of a right to government protectionism as consumers have to free trade, and that President Bush can turn thing around politically by imposing a massive hike of the federal gas tax. Uh-huh.
