https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/facing-new-crises-macron-repackages-old-bad-ideas/
The French president sees COVID-19 as yet another opportunity to deepen European integration.
At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:
I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.
Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”
They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.
In his view, the interviewers report, COVID-19 represents an opportunity to put an end to the “hyper-financialized world,” a phantom that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of communitarians, academics who refer to “late capitalism,” and European politicians. (Recall that, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an earlier French president, Nicolas Sarkozy — seemingly oblivious to the political and economic developments of the previous hundred years — announced that laissez-faire capitalism was “finished.”)