We've all seen the savages burning and looting France, and leftists -- whose entire worldview is dedicated to a fascination with and defense of the weird, the deranged, and the violent -- offering the usual excuses.
This is all about people's frustration with high energy prices, they say, or the depredations of billionaires (yes, billionaires are France's problem!), or cuts to the French education system and welfare state.
As usual, people making these kinds of excuses for violent savages are living in an alternate reality:
Nobody loots and destroys because class sizes are too high, and the looters jumping up and down with glee as fires burn behind them are not demanding more hours of math study.
Moreover, according to a Community Note on X, "France's level of public social spending was third highest in the world at 30.6% of GDP in 2024. Excluding the pandemic, it is slightly down from its 31.9% high in 2014. Total public spending is 57.2%, second highest among large countries not at war and near all-time highs."
I don't like high energy prices, but I've never thought to myself: the thing to do is loot a Louis Vuitton.
(Someone correctly mocked the rioters by writing, "France was hiding their educational resources in the Louis Vuitton store this entire time!")
The rioters have no demands that anyone should take seriously. Cutting social spending in France is in fact one of the most salutary moves that country could make.
Now imagine that your country is under assault by violent degenerates who hate you, and the man in charge of stopping it is Emmanuel Macron. Not exactly an ideal situation, that. These photos of a local woman pleading with migrants burning and destroying have been making the rounds. "Why are you doing this? Stop it! That's not what we stand for!"
It seems likely she believed the slogans. The people who tried to warn her turned out to be right.
Elsewhere in the city, a jewelry boutique owner took to Instagram to call attention to the damage to her shop, into which she says she had poured so many tears -- but even she can't resist saying, "First of all please note, I fully support the lycéens protest, their furor and their requests. And objects stolen are not comparable to lives or futures stolen."
(Recall here Robert Frost's definition of a liberal as someone who refuses to take his own side in an argument.)
But although mass migration is related to the stagnation France and other European countries have been experiencing, it's not the whole story, either.
No answers that involve expanding the French government's budget or imposing still more burdens on the private sector can accomplish anything more than buying a little bit more time. The effects of those approaches on the French economy will generate still more stagnation -- although, since most people have no idea why their economy is stagnant, heaven knows they'll try to solve the problem by expanded public budgets.
Any European country that wants an economic renaissance can get it. In every single case a parasitic state is sucking the life out of commercial activity.
Over lunch with an old friend in London a few months ago I was told: it is criminal what the state is doing to young people over here. Those who do manage to build careers and begin promising lives are crushed by punitive taxation. This friend said his son is thinking of taking a work opportunity in the United States because the lower taxes mean he'll actually be able to save some money for his future.
Macron in France, and the various nonentities shuffling in and out of the regime in London, are joking when they pretend to side with young people who are in despair about their futures (not that that's what the riots are actually about).
I do understand why young people in the U.S. feel frustrated: the best their guidance counselor can come up with is to send them away for four years to accumulate $200,000 in debt, then send them into a world in which their job prospects will still make even buying a house a challenge.
So how about doing something else?
If everyone is doing something you know will end in tears, why not do something different?
Here's that something, and take 30% off with code WOODS:
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