A young pro-capitalist heroine shows that not all Europeans oppose economic liberty

Source : The American Enterprise

Last year, a crowd of 80,000 Parisians gathered to say they had had enough of a strike by transportation unions which wits paralyzing their city. This counter-demonstration was organized by a tiny; cheeky frees enterprise think tank and lobby called "Liberté, j'écris ton nom" (Liberty, I write your name). Sabine Herold, a young French wanton enrolled in business school after earning a degree in political science (from the University of Paris, is vice president of the group. She and her twentysomething friends present a fresh face of' protest in Franceas proponents of individual liberty and the fire market, in a country long dominated by statism and socialist sentiment. When Herold electrified the 80,000 Parisians, thrilled admirers compared her to a young Margaret thatcher or a new Joan of Arc. Critics suggested she must be a silly rich girl. In fact, Herold is neither silly nor etch, and her group intends to change France. Edward Grossman recently inter-viewed her for The American Enterprise.

TAE: Is there as much anti-globalization sentiment here in France as one is told?

HEROLD: Absolutely! France leads when it comes to that. But what is anti-globalization? It's a refusal to face the world as it becomes one.

TAE: Does globalization imply Americanization?

HEROLD: Yes. Americanization means the global spread of products and ideas, especially that of individual liberty.

TAE: What's the effect on various cultures?

HEROLD: It often does mean a loss of national cultures. Yet it's up to the different people in each country to defend their own culture. If the French don't want to speak French, or if they want to eat at McDonald's, that's their decision. And may the best culture win.

TAE: What do your parents do?

HEROLD: They're schoolteachers in the little town where I grew up a hundred miles north of here.

TAE: Children of the Sixties?

HEROLD: Yes and no. They were in university in 1968, when the pseudo-revolutions took place, but they didn't participate. If they have any political leaning I'd say it's to the moderate right. They remember May 1968 as one enormous circus. Whereas many teachers well into their 50s romanticize the huge strikes, the students marching, etc. But these people tend to he socialists. Old '68-ers who keep wearing their hair long and everything.

After the "revolution" of '68 the cobblestones had to be removed from most of the streets so Parisians couldn't throw them at police. I don't miss that. It's reform we're after, not revolution.
TAE: Are your parents responsible for your ideas then?
HEROLD: Not really. Of course, thanks to them I've always been anti-communist. But there wasn't too much politics discussed at home.

TAE: And your teachers in high school?

HEROLD: Sonic used to rub me the wrong way by presenting the USSR as an alternative to the United States. I did have one teacher I valued. She had us read Montesquieu and Voltaireour own writers preaching liberty.

TAE: Are French students exposed much to ideas of freedom and liberty?

HEROLD: Not much. It depends on what's assigned by the teachers, and in the university most are leftists. I became libertarian thanks to my own reading and to friends I made.

TAE: Which writers have influenced you most?

HEROLD: Well, Hayek of course. Tocqueville. And then the brilliant Raymond Aron. Writers who champion the free market, but as a means, not an end in itself. The end is individual liberty. A free market is the best way to protect and nurture and maximize individual liberty.

TAE: Is that so in all places, at all times? What about China?

HEROLD: The problem there isn't too much of a free market, but not enough. You haven't got a market in the real sense. Instead there's state monopolies and corruption. You need a license for everything at the local, regional, and national levels, and licenses mean bribes.

TAE: Is there something like a free market in the European Union or in your country?

HEROLD: Hardly. It's very difficult to start a new business, it takes so much time, you're crushed by taxes, and the greatest problem is bureaucracy.

TAE: What's the solution?

HEROLD: More economic liberty. We want to encourage reforms across the board, starting with education. We're preparing a report now on how the two national teachers' unions, both Trotskyite, contribute to the fact that 10 percent of kids leave school illiterate. My mother tells me of kids who just plain can't read.

TAE: What do talented French students want to do when they graduate?

 HEROLD: Many want to work abroad for some big international firm. The prospect of expatriation doesn't scare them. Many young people with good degrees in business and the sciences have more to hope for in the U.S. than here or in the E.U. Harward has a larger research budget than all French universities combined, So you're seeing more and more expatriates.

TAE: Do you think France is declining ?

HEROLD: Certainly many of its systems aren't working. What's needed is thoroughgoing reform, adaptation to local needs, privatization. In education, for instance, my group would keep the public system, but alongside it we'd encourage private schools and universities, and may the best system win. French voters have had it with do-nothing politicians. That's one reason why the extreme Left and extreme Right arc both gaining. In the absence of a true reforming party the only way to say "no" is to cast your vote that way. In general, our politicians lad courage. There's no will truly to reform. So far as Chirac is concerned, well, the minute there's a hint of a strike our president panics. Chirac is against all reform, an elderly gent worried about staying in power.

TAE: Would you ever go into politics?

HEROLD: I don't know. But in any case I wouldn't without first having worked and made a career in business. I want to know that I can be successful there.

TAE: What aspect of business?

HEROLD: lid like to turn around companies in distress.

TAE: Are there many such in France?

HEROLD: There's no lack. It's due to our inability to adapt to be competitive in the global market, and of course to our vast national and European Union bureaucracy and sky-high taxes.

TAE: How goes the unification of Europe?

HEROLD: Quite slowly. So far, we mainly have the rise of a super-bureaucracy.

TAE: How much anti-Americanism exists in France now?

HEROLD: A great deal! The U.S. is perceived by many as both friend and enemy, a country much stronger than ours. Many rind this bard to accept. For me it's not an issue, although I'm a French patriot and French is my language and I feel at home only here.

TAE: Does anti-Americanism imply anti-Semitism?

HEROLD: Yes. There's a scary rise in anti-Semitism in France at the moment. Our media faithfully shows us the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets and never those of Israelis killed by Palestinian bombs. And there are incidents of Jews here being attacked. You've got to read the newspapers very carefully to learn of it, because it's played down.

TAE: Are we speaking of just of a few roughnecks and Islamists in the Muslim community? Kids in the immigrant housing projects on the outskirts of Paris and other cities?

HEROLD: There's a general indifference among French leftists, which encourages this behavior. And of course on the extreme Left you have the international Jewish conspiracy theoriesthat's where anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism meet and why the French extreme Left allies itself with the Islamists.

TAE: Recently the National Assembly passed a law forbidding headscarves or any other conspicuous religious signs being worn in public schools. What's your thinking?

HEROLD: We think it's a bad law. Nobody has any' business forcing a girl to wear a headscarf, and nobody has any business forbidding her doing it if she wants to. The headscarf law drags us into a kind of obligatory atheism. Do you know one big reason Muslim girls chose to wear headscarves? It's because if they don't, they'll be treated like whores in the projects. They're afraid of being raped. There's the problemthe lack of security, the drug-trafficking, the jobless guys rolling around in BMWs. Not the headscarf as such.

TAE: What did 9/11 mean for you?

HEROLD: A page in history being turned. And for a while, even here, a great fear. But after a short while people went on with life as usual. As if it was only the US and not France, involved! We have the same values; the U.S. symbolizes individual liberty; and so we ought to see 9/11 as an attack on us as well. Before the Iraq war, our group held a rally in front of the American embassy supporting Franco-American friendship. At the time you had these so-called "peace" rallies which in fact were pure and simple expressions of hatred for America. You saw photomontages of Bush with Hitler. There were people walking around in bin Laden T-shirts. It was truly revolting. The U.S. acted in Iraq to liberate a people from a tyran who'd tortured and killed millions. Just because you can't cure all the ills of the world doesn't mean you should not cure any. Forty years of dictatorship can't be overcome in 15 days, but there's a free Iraqi press now, trade is picking up, and the Libyans and Saudis and Iranians have taken a lesson. The war was justified.

TAE: Do your critics accuse you of parrotting the American line?

HEROLD: Of course. And so? We're not blind supporters of American policy or George Bush. On Iraq we agreed with him. On other subjects like tariffs on imported steel we disagree. In any case, our main focus is on problems here at home.