France Is Collapsing Under Socialism and America Is Right Behind It

France Is Bribing Its Own Youth With Money It Does Not Have

Four billion euros for school renovations. Fifteen thousand new university spots. Smaller class sizes. The French government is handing out concessions to student protesters like a parent trying to quiet a toddler in a grocery store. And the financial press is treating it like some kind of responsible governance.

It is not. It is panic spending layered on top of a system that is already structurally bankrupt. And while everyone watches the riots outside Louis Vuitton storefronts and argues about immigration, the actual economic rot underneath France is going completely unaddressed.

The Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Here is what the headlines are not telling you. Over 40% of France’s entire education budget goes to pensions. Not current teachers. Not kids in classrooms. Pensions. The average retired French teacher on a pension earns more than the typical worker in their 20s or 30s in that same country.

So when the French government announces it is fixing education by adding more spots and more teachers, ask yourself: who is paying for their eventual pensions? The same young people protesting in the streets right now.

• More university admissions do not solve a capital formation problem
• There are no jobs waiting for these graduates because there is no investment climate to create them
• Switzerland, right next door, runs an apprenticeship model that actually produces employable people
• France keeps treating the symptom and ignoring the disease

We Are on the Same Road. Just Not as Far Down It Yet.

I have referenced Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” plenty of times. France is not a cautionary tale from a different world. France is us, fifteen years from now, if the trajectory does not change.

Bill Maher, of all people, accidentally made this point correctly. He noted that young Americans want socialism because they grew up watching the elderly generation collect Social Security, Medicare, and subsidized everything while seemingly living their best life. The problem is young Americans already know they are not getting that same deal. They are being told their taxes will go up to fund it for someone else.

That is the generational theft hiding in plain sight. And the financial establishment, the same Wall Street crowd, the same political class, nobody wants to say it plainly because the people collecting those benefits vote.

What This Should Make You Do Differently

If you are watching France and thinking it cannot happen here, you are not paying attention:

• Government dependency is not a retirement plan. It is a political promise made by people who will not be around when it breaks.
• The entitlement math does not work. It did not work in France. It will not work here either.
• Tax increases on working Americans are not a fringe idea anymore. They are openly on the table to fund obligations that were made decades ago.
• Build your own financial foundation. Not because I am cynical, but because the evidence in real time, playing out right now in France, says you cannot afford not to.

France is not some foreign cautionary tale. It is a mirror. And right now, we do not love what we see in it.