...therefore we slack

Emulate the yankee, she said:

...in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their "old national habit."

"France is a country that thinks," she told the National Assembly. "There is hardly an ideology that we haven't turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves."

Citing Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.

....The government's call to work is key to its ambitious campaign to revitalize the French economy by increasing both employment and consumer buying power.

Somehow it hopes to persuade the French that it is in their interest to abandon what some commentators call a nationwide "laziness" and to work longer and harder, and maybe even get rich.

France's legally mandated 35-hour workweek gives workers a lot of leisure time but not necessarily the means to enjoy it. Taxes on high-wage earners are so burdensome that hordes have fled abroad.

(Sarkozy cites the case of one of his stepdaughters, who works in an investment banking firm in London.)

In her National Assembly speech, Lagarde said that there should be no shame in personal wealth and that the country needed tax breaks to lure back the rich.

"All these French bankers" working in London and "all these fiscal exiles" taking refuge from French taxes in Belgium "want one thing: to come back to France," she said. "To them, as well as to all our compatriots who are looking for the keys to fiscal paradise, we open our doors."