JONAH GOLDBERG: What Americans can learn from the French protests

Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg writes that the widespread looting and arson across French cities — including the burning of the Hotel de Ville in Limoges — reveal a crisis deeper than the education budget cuts that initially sparked demonstrations. French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez acknowledged Monday that police have "lost control" in some areas, though many protest leaders have condemned the violence.

Goldberg argues the chaos is rooted in France's failure to assimilate immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, dismissing the idea that those ransacking luxury stores are motivated by school funding. He notes the protests expanded from specific education cuts to broad opposition to austerity, driven by socialist parties and labor unions demanding more spending on pensions and entitlements.

The columnist highlights France's fiscal trajectory: public debt has risen from 15 percent of GDP in 1974 to 116 percent today, and government spending consumes 57 percent of GDP compared to 23 percent in the United States. France spends three times more on social protection than the U.S. and leads the OECD in corporate tax rates, while the top 10 percent of earners pay 74 percent of personal income taxes.

Goldberg expresses sympathy for nonviolent French youth facing a moribund economy where retirees consume 14 percent of GDP through pensions — compared to 9.4 percent for U.S. Social Security and Medicare. He notes one-third of France's education budget funds Education Ministry pensions, and that President Emmanuel Macron's 2023 reform to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 paralyzed the country before being suspended last month.

The column concludes that France is caught in a "dependency trap" with too few workers to support older generations, and that economist Thomas Piketty's diagnosis of "capitalist logic" underinvestment ignores the scale of existing taxation and spending. Goldberg writes he is "hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France's problems."

Sources: Las Vegas Review-Journal