The Guardian reports:

France’s new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused yesterday to push the country down the road towards free-market reform, saying “Gallic genius” would help put back on its feet a “suffering, impatient and angry” nation that has failed to adapt fully to a changing world.

In a speech to the packed lower house of the national assembly, Mr Villepin said his top aim was to cut the country’s stubborn 10%-plus unemployment rate and announced €4.5bn (£3bn) of extra money to achieve it.

But he insisted that an increasingly heated public debate about the shortcomings of France’s high-tax, high-protection social model compared with the more liberal Anglo-Saxon system was irrelevant.

“In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action,” he said. “Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius.”

This isn’t one of those “pick on the French” blog posts, it’s just about the commonplace emptiness of that last sentence. Unemployment, inflation, deflation, Africa, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, teenage hoods, vandalism, cars with the bumpers hanging off, etc.: no one’s not saying we should do something. The question is: what? That’s the hard part, not the “when we figure it out we should do it élan and style”.

(þ Simberg)