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CNet’s Stephen Shankland has the
interesting story of encounters at international tech
entrepreneurship conference, LeWeb,
between start-up business people and
Arnaud Montebourg, France’s minister for industrial renewal.
Specifically, entrepreneurs compared their experiences in America
and Britain, where they were relatively free to innovate, take
risk, hire, and fire as needed in order to get businesses off the
ground, with the rule-bound and expensive process in France. An
interaction at the 11:00 mark in the video below makes it clear
that, whatever Montebourg’s title,  there’s probably little
renewal in store for France anytime soon.

Clara Shih, founder and chief executive of Hearsay Social, had a
message she said [organizer Loic] Le Meur could deliver to
Montebourg: “You should tell him to make it easier to hire and
fire,” she said. “It would be helpful for employers…to have more
flexible labor laws, because then we would be more aggressive about
hiring.”

When Le Meur delivered the message, with reinforcement from Jeff
Clavier founder and managing partner of SoftTech Venture Capital,
Montebourg said things are different here.

“We are not California. We are French,” Montebourg said. “We
have a tradition to help people, to protect people. The question
for us is to find a good balance between protection and what you
need.”

Clavier wasn’t buying it. More flexibility would mean more jobs,
he said.

“The reason we create so many jobs in California and have such
low unemployment is that we can contract with or get rid of people
as we need to, if they don’t perform or as economic issues arise.
The point is that we create the jobs first and then contract
afterwards as opposed to thinking for 12 or 18 months whether we
can afford to hire one more person.”

Note that France
faces protests around the country against high taxes and
intrusive regulation that make doing business increasingly
difficult. Truck drivers
blocked roads to protest an “ecotax,” and the government even
produced a secret (but leaked) report saying that
taxation was losing legitimacy and the country is on the verge of
revolt.

The Hollande government is under serious pressure to
ease byzantine labor regulation after the country was slammed
with a surprise credit downgrade. Those rules are sufficiently
bizarre as to require companies to
keep money-losing plants with inefficient workforces
open—apparently indefinitely, or at least until the money runs
out.

Which makes a less-than-enticing environment for entrepreneurial
types.

As Le Meur told Montebourg at LeWeb, “The problem here is that
countries around us see this as trying to slow down startups.
You’re penalizing the startups. They try of course to disrupt
systems. That’s how they grow. The image of France is that it’s the
country where they try to slow you down to protect the past.”

CNet’s Stephen Shankland has the
interesting story of encounters at international tech
entrepreneurship conference, LeWeb,
between start-up business people and
Arnaud Montebourg, France’s minister for industrial renewal.
Specifically, entrepreneurs compared their experiences in America
and Britain, where they were relatively free to innovate, take
risk, hire, and fire as needed in order to get businesses off the
ground, with the rule-bound and expensive process in France. An
interaction at the 11:00 mark in the video below makes it clear
that, whatever Montebourg’s title,  there’s probably little
renewal in store for France anytime soon.

Clara Shih, founder and chief executive of Hearsay Social, had a
message she said [organizer Loic] Le Meur could deliver to
Montebourg: “You should tell him to make it easier to hire and
fire,” she said. “It would be helpful for employers…to have more
flexible labor laws, because then we would be more aggressive about
hiring.”

When Le Meur delivered the message, with reinforcement from Jeff
Clavier founder and managing partner of SoftTech Venture Capital,
Montebourg said things are different here.

“We are not California. We are French,” Montebourg said. “We
have a tradition to help people, to protect people. The question
for us is to find a good balance between protection and what you
need.”

Clavier wasn’t buying it. More flexibility would mean more jobs,
he said.

“The reason we create so many jobs in California and have such
low unemployment is that we can contract with or get rid of people
as we need to, if they don’t perform or as economic issues arise.
The point is that we create the jobs first and then contract
afterwards as opposed to thinking for 12 or 18 months whether we
can afford to hire one more person.”

Note that France
faces protests around the country against high taxes and
intrusive regulation that make doing business increasingly
difficult. Truck drivers
blocked roads to protest an “ecotax,” and the government even
produced a secret (but leaked) report saying that
taxation was losing legitimacy and the country is on the verge of
revolt.

The Hollande government is under serious pressure to
ease byzantine labor regulation after the country was slammed
with a surprise credit downgrade. Those rules are sufficiently
bizarre as to require companies to
keep money-losing plants with inefficient workforces
open—apparently indefinitely, or at least until the money runs
out.

Which makes a less-than-enticing environment for entrepreneurial
types.

As Le Meur told Montebourg at LeWeb, “The problem here is that
countries around us see this as trying to slow down startups.
You’re penalizing the startups. They try of course to disrupt
systems. That’s how they grow. The image of France is that it’s the
country where they try to slow you down to protect the past.”

French
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has said that troops from other
European nations will be taking part in the intervention in the
Central African Republic. During a radio interview last Sunday,
Fabius said that logistical support for the U.N.-backed mission was
already being supplied by Poland, the U.K., Germany, Spain, and
Belgium. The U.S. has also provided support, having flown troops
from Burundi to the Central African Republic.

From
France 24:

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, announced on
Tuesday that other European countries would deploy ground troops to
the violence-hit Central African Republic, without identifying
them.

“We will soon have troops on the ground provided by our European
colleagues,” he told the lower house of the French National
Assembly, days after he decided to seek help from the rest of
Europe with its former colony, where France has deployed a
1,600-strong force to quell brutal sectarian violence.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don’t forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at @reason247.

For four years running, Gene Healy has closed the
holiday season with a column saying “bah, humbug” to the
year’s worst op-eds. Christmas came early this year, thanks to
perennial contender David Brooks. In Thursday’s New York
Times, Brooks offered a bold panacea for the problems of our
time: We need to “Strengthen the Presidency.” It strikes Healy as
counterintuitive to imagine that a president with a drone
fleet, a “kill list,” dragnet databases of Americans’ personal
information, and increasingly arbitrary authority over health
care’s one-sixth of the U.S. economy has too little
power.

View this article.

For four years running, Gene Healy has closed the
holiday season with a column saying “bah, humbug” to the
year’s worst op-eds. Christmas came early this year, thanks to
perennial contender David Brooks. In Thursday’s New York
Times, Brooks offered a bold panacea for the problems of our
time: We need to “Strengthen the Presidency.” It strikes Healy as
counterintuitive to imagine that a president with a drone
fleet, a “kill list,” dragnet databases of Americans’ personal
information, and increasingly arbitrary authority over health
care’s one-sixth of the U.S. economy has too little
power.

View this article.

That’s an official, Obama-administration-approved picture, one
of an endless stream of photos released via the official White
House feed. Increasingly, sanctioned photos of Obama are all the
public is seeing because the guy who pledged the most transparent
administration ever is maintaining unprecedented control over
independent snapshots of his activities.

Andrew Malcolm, a former press flack for First Lady Laura Bush
now writing for Investor’s Business Daily, notes that Obama even
banned photographers accompanying him on his flight to South Africa
for Nelson Mandela’s funeral from taking pictures of the president
with George W. Bush (widely circulated photos of the pair onboard
Air Force One were offical photos). Yet, says
Malcolm, social media sites allow for a steady drip, drip, drip
of supposedly behind-the-scenes images that promise access but
really only “allow Obama to claim a kind of public
transparency, giving individuals sanitized access to hidden moments
with what are, in effect, mere photo news releases.”

Malcolm is following up on a complaint voiced by the AP’s
director of photography, Santiago Lyon, who argued in the New
York Times,

The official photographs the White House hands out are but
visual news releases. Taken by government employees (mostly former
photojournalists), they are well composed, compelling and even
intimate glimpses of presidential life. They also show the
president in the best possible light, as you’d expect from an
administration highly conscious of the power of the image at a time
of instant sharing of photos and videos.

By no stretch of the imagination are these images journalism.
Rather, they propagate an idealized portrayal of events on
Pennsylvania Avenue.

More here.

One can argue whether such actions constitute “Orwellian image
control,” as Lyon believes, but there’s no question that Team
Obama’s maniac attempts to keep control of the narrative is
unsettling.
And generally ineffective, if recent polls are any indication.
Indeed, energy spent trying to keep tabs on who has access to take
pictures of or write about the president drains resources away from
actually addressing problems and policy screwups. Insularity tends
to create defensiveness, which makes it all the more difficult to
deal with, say, disastrous rollouts of healthcare.gov.

Speaking of transparency, take 50 seconds to watch this 2010
Reason TV gem about the “Real World: DC,” which covers what happens
when when Congress stops being polite…and starts secret, detailed
negotiations on a sweeping, transformative health care reform
bill…

That’s an official, Obama-administration-approved picture, one
of an endless stream of photos released via the official White
House feed. Increasingly, sanctioned photos of Obama are all the
public is seeing because the guy who pledged the most transparent
administration ever is maintaining unprecedented control over
independent snapshots of his activities.

Andrew Malcolm, a former press flack for First Lady Laura Bush
now writing for Investor’s Business Daily, notes that Obama even
banned photographers accompanying him on his flight to South Africa
for Nelson Mandela’s funeral from taking pictures of the president
with George W. Bush (widely circulated photos of the pair onboard
Air Force One were offical photos). Yet, says
Malcolm, social media sites allow for a steady drip, drip, drip
of supposedly behind-the-scenes images that promise access but
really only “allow Obama to claim a kind of public
transparency, giving individuals sanitized access to hidden moments
with what are, in effect, mere photo news releases.”

Malcolm is following up on a complaint voiced by the AP’s
director of photography, Santiago Lyon, who argued in the New
York Times,

The official photographs the White House hands out are but
visual news releases. Taken by government employees (mostly former
photojournalists), they are well composed, compelling and even
intimate glimpses of presidential life. They also show the
president in the best possible light, as you’d expect from an
administration highly conscious of the power of the image at a time
of instant sharing of photos and videos.

By no stretch of the imagination are these images journalism.
Rather, they propagate an idealized portrayal of events on
Pennsylvania Avenue.

More here.

One can argue whether such actions constitute “Orwellian image
control,” as Lyon believes, but there’s no question that Team
Obama’s maniac attempts to keep control of the narrative is
unsettling.
And generally ineffective, if recent polls are any indication.
Indeed, energy spent trying to keep tabs on who has access to take
pictures of or write about the president drains resources away from
actually addressing problems and policy screwups. Insularity tends
to create defensiveness, which makes it all the more difficult to
deal with, say, disastrous rollouts of healthcare.gov.

Speaking of transparency, take 50 seconds to watch this 2010
Reason TV gem about the “Real World: DC,” which covers what happens
when when Congress stops being polite…and starts secret, detailed
negotiations on a sweeping, transformative health care reform
bill…