...I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States.

.... the $3.6 trillion Obama budget made me a little queasy. There is a touch of France in its “étatisme” — the state as all-embracing solution rather than problem — and there’s more than a touch of France in the bash-the-rich righteousness with which the new president cast his plans as “a threat to the status quo in Washington.”

Of course, the budget proposal represents a maximalist position that Congress will claw back. Obama knows that. Still there was something breathtaking about the scope of the president’s targets and ambitions. For everyone from the oil and gas industry to drug companies, the message was clear: Off with their heads!

I’d thought of Obama as less Robespierre than Talleyrand. I still think he’s more bridge-building centrist than revolutionary. He needs to be. Money has never been more fungible than today.

Punish capital and it will punish you by saying, “Hasta la vista!” The former French President François Mitterrand learned that a little over a quarter-century ago when, after an initial wave of nationalizations, he reversed course.