Identifying the goals of a French protest is like pondering the physics inside a black hole. France has long celebrated the pageantry and drama of protest movements even when the goal of the fucking thing is very much TBD. And so it is with France’s current protests-cum-riots: They are either about school funding, or police brutality, or Palestine, or immigration, or inequality generally, or like…farm…unions…regulations about unions or farmers or something. And of course racism: There’s either too much racism or too little or possibly just the wrong kind.
While only a lunatic would co-sign the goals of such an undefined movement, which is clearly as much about youthful rebellion as anything else. But a solid point is available to les jeunes de Paris should they choose to make it. Though France is not a legitimate target for any “neoliberal hellscape” argument — they have the highest spending-to-GDP ratio in the OECD — how France spends its money is notable. France spends a shocking amount on old people — I’ll run through those wrinkly, grey statistics in a minute, but trust me: French geezers be ballin’. It is accurate to say that spending on French retirees makes it hard to spend money on anything else. France has the most advanced case of a disease that’s sweeping the Western world, which is the hallucination that lavish spending on old people does not diminish resources for the young.
