Ep. 1858 - The Riots In France Aren’t What You Think

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Matt Walsh (0:56)

If you had to pick a country that's given the left everything they've demanded as part of their grand campaign to rid the world of social injustice, France would probably sit at the very top of that list. France has a government mandated 35 hour work week, so everybody has tons of free time, or else they make a killing in overtime. You never have to stay late at the office in France, but even if you don't have a job, no worries, you still get free healthcare from the cradle to the grave.

Quite a nice set up, we're told. Never mind the fact that as a result of these perks, government spending in France accounts for more than 57% of GDP compared to just 24% for the federal government in the US. Even when you add in state and local governments, we're still well under 40% of GDP. So 57% by comparison is a staggering number. In fact, France spends more on public social spending than the share of GDP than any country in the entire world. And you can see it there on the chart. France is number one followed by Austria, Finland, Italy, Belgium and Germany. So to recap, they aren't producing very much. They aren't working particularly hard or at all. And at the same time, they're taxing everybody into the ground and spending more on welfare than anyone else on the globe. France collects around 70% more tax revenue relative to the size of its economy than the United States.

In practice, this means that businesses have to pay substantially more taxes for every employee they hire. Personal income taxes are higher. Consumption taxes are dramatically higher. Taxes on stock sales are higher along with corporate income tax. The result is that nobody wants to start a business in France because you get penalized for it. The employees barely work. The taxes are cartoonishly high. And so there's no growth. There's no innovation.

There are no good jobs. And other than that, France is a great place to live. A few years ago, France decided that the crushing tax burden, stagnant economy and total lack of ambition and innovation wasn't destroying their country fast enough. So they came up with a great idea. They decided to open the borders. They accepted more than three million foreigners in just the past decade in a country of only around 69 million people. With many of these foreigners, of course, coming from third-world hellholes in Africa. At no point in France's history has the percentage of foreigners relative to the total population been as high as it is right now. These foreigners, most of them with very low IQs and poor language abilities, that's just a statistical fact on both counts, had no intention of assimilating into French culture.

Not that they could even if they wanted to, but they did have a strong desire to leech off of France's expansive welfare system, and naturally these foreigners put even more strain on the economy, an economy that was already in freefall. Such a fragile and poorly run country simply cannot survive any kind of significant shock or strain. There's just no margin for error. Any crisis was always going to put France into a tailspin. In 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, the European Central Bank printed trillions of euros, causing inflation in every aspect of life. And more recently, due to the war in the Middle East and the Ukrainian bombing campaign against diesel infrastructure in Russia, the cost of energy, which affects the price of virtually everything, of course, has only increased even further. And the result of all of that is what you're seeing on your screen right now. All of that footage that you're seeing is from Paris over just the past few days. Rioters from a range of demographics, including white Antifa communists and black Muslims from Africa, have united to sack Paris and to terrorize the rest of France. Shops are being looted and ransacked all over the country. Police officers are getting attacked in the street. And instead of responding to the rioters, the police are running away. In one case, a rioter torched a woman's face with a flamethrower on camera.