The essay contends that France’s recurring protests stem less from the welfare state itself than from democracy’s high time-preference incentives, which reward politicians for short-term benefits whose costs later fuel further unrest.

It notes that France has lacked a balanced budget since the late 1970s, carries public debt near 120 percent of GDP and a public sector exceeding 58 percent of the economy, and contrasts this with stronger growth and slower debt increases in less democratic Peru.

The author concludes that efforts to shrink the welfare state are futile without confronting democracy as the underlying driver of expanding statism.

Thousands of young French people are protesting for better public services. Statist vermin exploit this social group’s organic discontent and try to turn the young people’s clamorous grievances into a stream of ballots falling into the ballot boxes of socialism, as though it were Disney’s classic Fantasia.

This is so true and, at the same time, so unspecific that I could occasionally copy and paste it into a political article or commentary and it would be very difficult to dispute. The recurrence of this Jacobin scenario over time merely exposes a systemic problem, one that—like every issue in the social sciences—has numerous layers. It therefore falls to the enlightened man to strip away this nuisance until he reaches the truth, however abject it may be.

Many classical liberals have set to work with this intention. Yet they have felt a piercing dread upon reaching the point of removing the final veil. Frozen by the uncomfortable situation, they have preferred to point in the right direction without specifying how far one must go to find the ultimate cause of the problem.

Juan Ramón Rallo and Daniel Lacalle, for example, point to high public spending, indebtedness, the pension system for civil servants and, more broadly, the welfare state as the ultimate cause of France’s recurring crises. Rallo argues that France’s underlying problem is a dysfunctional welfare state that has also created welfare-dependent ghettos containing millions of people insufficiently integrated into society.

Although Lacalle has not, as yet, commented specifically on France’s current troubles, his discussions of the French system have focused on its public debt, which now stands at close to 120 percent, according to the official forecast. Lacalle notes that France has not had a balanced budget since the late 1970s. He also highlights the public sector’s weight in the economy—more than 58 percent—and one of the highest tax wedges in the OECD. In his view, copying socialist policies ends up........

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