President Emmanuel Macron announced today the closure of the notorious École Nationale d’Administration, the elite finishing school for the senior civil servants and politicians who have wrecked France. Perhaps nothing could serve France better than burning down its Strasbourg campus and salting the earth, but there’s less to this than meets the eye. This is the third time he’s announced this.
Statism is the religion of ENA, which explains why its brilliant graduates have conspicuously failed to create a single Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple. Its graduates have manoeuvred France, a nation that once led the world in innovation and creativity, into a cul de sac of ‘immobilisme,’ crushing innovation while creating for its citizens a sort of Absurdistan, a bureaucratically sclerotic, low- to no-growth economy where there are riots every night and you currently need a permit to walk your dog after 7pm.
One indication of this immobilism is that reform of ENA was first proposed 50 years ago, and nothing has happened.
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