October 17, 2025
Mon dieu! La France has run out of politicians. The Republic of this great democracy has hundreds of professional politicians. In fact, 577 in its National Assembly. Yet it can’t seem to find a prime minister who can hold this difficult job.
So, citizens, aux armes. Form your battalions. Tyranny threatens the Republic.
The problem is simple, yet complex. The French welfare state costs too much to run. French voters are spoiled and coddled. The machinery of state works very well but too many citizens are enjoying the good life while too few are paying the bills through taxes. All western democracies suffer from similar problems, but few suffer as much or as loudly.
The French hate taxes. The French Revolution of 1789 was primarily ignited by increases in taxation caused by the need to cover the large costs of financing the American Revolution. French governments never seem to have balanced the books since then.
France’s excellent educational system – which in comparison makes the US equivalent look third world – is filled with leftist pedagogues. The French Socialist and Communist Parties totally infiltrated the educational system and institutionalised its leftist, anti-capitalist, statist thinking. The essence of this ideology is a nanny state, socialist economics, powerful labor unions, rich state subsidies and promoting government run industries. While the thrifty Germans were pinching their pfennigs, France was spending like a drunken sailor. Too many powerful political elements ensured that special interests would always benefit from the government gravy train.
France built an excellent medical, transportation and educational system but had to short change its military. A rueful general once told me France’s total military budget was smaller than the US Navy’s annual spending. Even so, France has sought to remain a world-class strategic power on a skimpy budget.
Ever since the 19th Century, France has been locked in political and social warfare between the Left and Right. Each Socialist or other leftist government has made matters worse. Even moderate governments have been unable to resist popular demands for ever more welfare spending.
The chief culprit has been France’s crazy retirement laws that allow the French to retire at only 62 years old. I’ve seen how the French countryside is filled by bored, retired men who had to quit their jobs far too early. This featherbedding hurts the national economy, undermines productivity and saps national morale.
Most recently, centrist President Emmanuel Macron proposed a sensible new law increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64.
A furore erupted across France. I was having dinner in the northwestern fortress city of Metz when mobs of rampaging youth attacked our restaurant, parked cars and shops. These were 20-something youngsters who wouldn’t be eligible for pensions for another 40 years. But French love riots and demos even more than vin rouge and football.
Macron had to back down over this pension reform. Three of his choices for prime minister resigned or were ousted because of their inability to resolve France’s endemic financial crises. Today the budget deficit has hit 114% of gross domestic product, putting France in financial disrepute with bad boys Italy and Greece.
What to do? Cut runaway spendings or raise taxes? No one knows how to do this. Meanwhile, Trump is demanding higher military spending. Most Europeans are against bigger armies and higher taxes.
Macron’s latest nominee for premier, Sebastien Lecornu (meaning `horned one’ – a big insult in Italy) previously resigned but now says he will stay on. To do what? Sell the Eifel Tower to Trump? But if Lecornu does not find an answer, the powerful right-wing opposition led by Marine LePen is poised to take power. That will bring a new mess and crisis. How can ‘The Great Nation” be in such a cornichon? As in the past, France would do well to allow Swiss Bankers take over and run finances.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2025
This post is in: France
France has given up its sovereignty to the EU, which defacto, rules by decree over the whole of Europe. It is a mess. The taxes are already sky high and are a hurdle for any company to make money or to make an incentive for a civilian to begin something, to save money, to invest in a difficult study, to marry, even to out-migrate. Belgium(where I live) and even the Netherlands are like France. Germany is even a bigger mess than France, and nothing works there anymore. The taxes of France do not disappear in pensions, but in weird state driven programs and subsidies, like funding endless in-migration of people that are not productive and need transfer incomes, warmongering, green economy, wokism, ecology regulations that drive farmers to bankruptcy, all kinds of red tape that make organizing a business a frustrating daily experience and not worth the effort. All of Europe is paying like 60-80% of its income to the state via all kind of taxes and the state is spending like a drunken sailor. Europe is not rich, it thinks it is, but it has barely any natural resources. It was well organized some long time age and that was all. It was blowing up its BNP by pumping money around via state enforced spending and the tax system. There are just two, factors that keep France alive: good climate and cheap nuclear power. So Germany although with a lower state debt, but no reliable power grid and huge energy cost is in a worse condition. The sabotage of Europe was from within, by greenism, wokism, extreme socialism, power grab by institutions, corruption, climate policy and social policy hubris, linked to a human model that is wished for, but does not exist.
Equality as the basis for social outcome is the target. That destroyed the education system which is oriented on equality and not on maximizing one’s person’s production potential, which is different for any person. Now it is going to war against Russia, without resources , money, soldiers, or motivation in the population. State propaganda is enough. The whole of Europe is de-industrializing, France as well. When Germany is gone from the economic maps, all kind of supporting industry in France and the surrounding countries will fail. In the EU governments, that work with tainted statistics, everything looks OK. Success is redefined in communist rhetoric alike, slogans. Television and newspapers are worthless for information, they are just propaganda outlets for state policy and are a nag for differently informed people, that try to watch or read them because of the inconsistencies and full blown lies. Equality is in practice equally poor, equally stupid, equally without power, equally without transport, equally bad housing, equally being cold in the winters. The economy still works somewhat, but the direction of organization of society and wealth, is in a tailspin downward. France can just be considered 80% communist and the repression by sanctions and by censorship by EU regulation, is in the making. The in practice useless elections, election fraud, politicians that lie from day one and will never be hold personally responsible for the mess they sell, they continue, and make a new ones, goes on. The EU will go the same direction as the USSR but with a naughty detail: the post USSR had metal resources and huge energy sources, the EU has none. It will have electric cars that cannot be recharged because of lack of power. The EU countries will be too poor to replace the “alternative energy” electric power grid or even to maintain it, let alone pay for the gas to stabilize production of electric power. All wishful thinking of the woke, green EU leaders will lead to a dystopian situation, that can only be controlled by state institutions that have an Orwellian -1984- idea of keeping society stable and soviet style Secret Service activity, including political murders and executions. France WAS a great society, like Germany WAS, and Europe HAD a great culture and was innovative, because it was more or less free. That freedom is disappearing at great speed together with wealth creation.
Yes, early retirement is a death sentence especially for bureaucrats with no hobbies. For seniors it is a move or die choice.
Countries will have to get over the growth obsession and learn to live with a stable or declining GDP via a stable or declining population. Ageing is inevitable as this site lays out.
https://sustainablesociety.com/the-sheer-idiocy-of-fighting-ageing/
Budgets can only be balanced on the backs of a productive workforce which stays engaged at least part time for years after their official retirement.
Seniors I know who keep an active part-time job say they are having the best years of their lives. Freedom 55 was always a scam foisted on the public by the finance cult. Contribution makes for a good life, not vain glorious consumption.