printThis week, CNN’s ERIN BURNETT, HOST of OUTFRONT, and “a valued member of the OUTFRONT Strike Team,” whatever gimmick that stands for, entertained the possibility that President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party might just “save Europe’s economy and ours.”
Burnett’s babbling was boosted by “striker” Bill Gross, CO-CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER of PIMCO, who positively spun the political platform of Francois Hollande by describing France’s manifestly socialist agenda as “pro-growth,” and as “a different way forward.”
I listened to the Gross man live on TV. CNN’s transcriber failed to transcribe Gross’s salutary reference to France’s founding principles of “liberté, égalité, fraternité, writing in their place: “(INAUDIBLE)”
But here is Mr. Gross(out)’s verbatim nod to the blood-drenched, illiberal French Revolution and its legacy:
I think what [Hollande] is trying to do is favor labor as opposed to capital. Remember the (INAUDIBLE) [Gross actually said “liberté, égalité, fraternité”] and you know he’s moving in that direction. To the extent that he moves only gradually, I think that’s a positive. What France needs, what Euro land needs is growth. And to the extent that they can prevent a continuing recession, then the growth is going to be positive.
An “anti-austerity vote in France” Erin’s strike-man has conflated with a “pro-growth” agenda.
The Law is a pamphlet published in June, 1850, by Frédéric Bastiat, a great classical liberal “economist, statesman, and author.” Bastiat castigated his countrymen for becoming “the most governed, the most regulated, the most imposed upon, the most harnessed, and the most exploited people in Europe.”
In 1860, Bastiat saw France as a society that “receives its momentum from power”; a passive people who “consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy.”
“So long as they expect everything from the law,” he warned, “their relationship to the state [would be] the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.”
Moreover, Bastiat, who had a mind like no other, did not share Mr. Gross’s fondness for French “fraternity.” “Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty,” he proclaimed.
“In fact, it is impossible for me,” wrote the great man, “to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.”
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ILANA
“Enforced fraternity destroys liberty.” Sounds like modern day affirmitive action to me.
Erin Burnett OUTFRONT: esp. when ripping open own blouse on-camera. Gross probably wants to unload some T-bills, so anything that degrades the Euro – French profligacy, for instance -is fine with him.
All we have to do is look at America’s love affair with socialism for the last one hundred and fifty years. That will tell us the future faster than watching France play her games.
France could have been a really great nation if it had stuck to liberte seulement (liberty only). Egalite is a negative concept (e.g. equal before the law / equal before G-d) not that Myron Pauli deserves equal minutes on the basketball court with Michael Jordan.
And Fraternite – another negative concept (e.g. freedom to associate and to be left alone).
I notice that Erin Burnett went to an elite college (Williams) with ties to Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup – e.g. all the pedigree of the modern idiot savant.