In truth, the Muslims have not announced they are leaving France. But you couldn’t blame them if they did.
France is rocked by mostly peaceful protests these days. Numerous stores, schools, office buildings, cars, trash cans, and other things that will burn, have been burned.
The culprits, er, I mean the mostly peaceful protestors, are mostly bored college and high school kids, as is typical in France. A requirement for graduation since the 60s has been to burn a trash can. Post-graduate degrees require that you burn a car.
It’s the tame, modern equivalent to that age that France looks back upon fondly: The Reign of Terror. Americans shoot off fireworks to commemorate the War of Independence; the French burn government buildings to commemorate the storming of the Bastille.
The putative reason for the protests is as predictable as the identity of the protestors. As always, they want more money and less work – free stuff.
That’s not the way they say it, of course. The signs they carry don’t say “MORE FREE STUFF.” The signs instead protest the government’s attempt to limit the welfare state.
That limit is long overdue. France has run budget deficits far beyond the 3% allowed by the EU, due largely to a sprawling welfare state and the burden of an extravagant government pension program. They began spending even more during Covid, and never stopped, even after Covid stopped. The government has proposed very modest reductions in the rate of growth of that spending.
In view of the fiscal troubles of France, the market refuses to buy its bond debt unless they continue to raise the interest rates on the bonds, which adds yet more to the debt. It’s a vicious cycle.
Tax rates could be raised, but the rates are already punitive. In any event, there aren’t enough rich people that taxing them even more would make much difference in the fiscal woes of France. “Tax the rich” is more a slogan for the left’s hatred for people who are willing to work, rather than a way to balance the budget.
Printing more money is not the answer. France uses the Euro, not French currency.
Even if it still used the French franc, and could print more of them, the paper money of a society is not its wealth. The paper money is merely a reflector of that wealth so that society can function without a barter system. Printed dollars allow you to go to the grocery store without carrying gold bars or pieces of your house on your back to barter for your food.
Doubling the paper money does not double the wealth. Rather, it halves the value of the paper.
As for the true wealth of France, it’s not increasing fast enough to pay for the never-ending free stuff that the kids demand. It might even be declining. France is a laggard in computer technology, its work ethic stinks (at least in the large cities), it’s not a player in AI, it lacks Switzerland’s pharmaceutical industry, and it’s not the financial powerhouse that London used to be and New York City still is.
Most of this is known to the leftist leaders, apart from these naïve, spoiled college kids indoctrinated by their loony professors.
While they hide behind the promise of more free stuff, what the leftist leaders really want is to destroy nations. They’ve learned that they cannot gain power over a healthy nation – it never happens – but only over a crumbled one. Once in power, they insist that they will fix things (after having destroyed them) but what they really do is to loot what’s left.
We saw that in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, Cuba, and, more recently, Venezuela. In fact, we’ve seen that everywhere – everywhere! – that socialism has been tried.
The way to produce prosperity in an economy is to incentivize people to produce prosperity. People produce prosperity in the form of products and services; governments take it away in the form of taxes.
As for the mostly peaceful protests in France, I suspect that the coming cold weather will douse the fires in the heart of the cities and in the bellies of the protestors. The protests will not kill France.
But inflation might.
Back to the Muslims. Some of the protests include Muslims among the college kids and professional agitators. After all, Muslims are not immune to this sport, and many of them have an abundance of grievances against their adopted home.
But Muslims are not more than a fraction of the protestors. There could be zero Muslims in France, and they’d still have these protests. France has always had this streak of violent leftism, and always will.
Some of you have asked about my recent trip to Tuscany, the latest of many months that I’ve spent in Europe over the years. My answer is, it was grand. As always, the Italian countryside was beautiful, the food was great, the people were disorganized, and Rome was chaotic, dirty and magnificent.
