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 destroying what those policies claim to protect.
Neither Rallo nor Lacalle is wrong to identify the welfare state and public debt as decisive factors in France’s recurring bouts of social unrest. They falter, however, by failing to denounce the cause of this overgrown welfare state: democracy. This failure stems either from premature complacency, from settling for the most visible cause of France’s problems, or from a democratic bias—increasingly prevalent among classical liberals—that prevents them from seeing the true source of the problems they denounce. It is, so to speak, like accusing the guillotine’s blade of murdering Robespierre rather than the executioner who lets go of the rope.
This democratic bias leads to a toxic line of reasoning that conceals arrogance and timidity. The reasoning runs as follows: I correctly identify the welfare state as a cause of social unrest, and I also see, through the same economic logic I used to identify the welfare state as a problem, that democracy creates certain incentives that seem to push every political option toward statism. But—here comes the bias—if my economist friends and I governed, this would not happen to us, because we could indeed tame Leviathan, domesticate it and even make it friendly to the citizen. The problem is not democracy; it is that my side did not win.
This reasoning conceals an old classical liberal refrain that, by now, should be no more than a putrid breath: democracy is good because it allows an orderly transfer of power without civil war or similar conflicts. Even if we are charitable and accept this claim as true, what use is a peaceful transfer of power if conflicts that undermine peace and the economic process continue throughout a government’s term? Who, other than the ruler, has an interest in an orderly transition leading to a slow but peaceful decline? So far this century, France has experienced social unrest that has destroyed peace and undermined the possibility of reliable economic calculation and, consequently, economic development: in 2005, 2018–2019, twice in 2023, in 2025, and now in 2026. None of these episodes has resulted from a turbulent transfer of power or a conflict among the population.
If a reason for defending democracy is, for example, the peace that can lead to progress for its citizens, how is it that undemocratic Peru—with ten presidents in the past fifteen years and only four of them democratically elected—has achieved cumulative real GDP growth of 53.3 percent, while orderly France has achieved 17.6 percent over the same fifteen years? How is it that—over that same period—GDP per capita has risen by 68 percent in Peru, compared with 13 percent in France? Assuming any of these measures mean anything.
Even for democrats who rightly abhor public spending, from 2010 to 2024, chaotic Peru increased its debt-to-GDP ratio 7 percent, while democratic France increased its own by 26 percent. Beyond the empirical comparison between these two countries, however, economic theory itself clearly points to the symbiosis between the democratic system and the inexorable growth of the welfare state.
There is a rich intellectual tradition that begins with Gustave de Molinari, passes through Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and reaches our own time with thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Jesús Huerta de Soto, who denounce how the most rampant statism nests within democracy itself.
This can be understood as follows: there is a dimension, an aspect present in every action. I am referring to what economists call time preference, a category of human action. Every action we decide to undertake—or not—has associated costs: the time it takes, the energy spent performing it, and the materials needed to carry it out. Even if it required none of the above, its cost would be forgoing everything we could have done instead.
Naturally, we bear the costs of our actions because we expect a future benefit from that effort. If we believed that an action’s costs outweighed its benefits, we simply would not undertake it. The question is: how far into the future are we willing to wait for those benefits?
If we can bear substantial costs in the present for future gains, economists would describe this as a low time preference. If, by contrast, we want immediate benefits regardless of present or future costs, we would be speaking of a high time preference. A father who makes sacrifices to give his child a good education has a low time preference. An adult who takes on high-interest debt to go on a cruise without knowing how to pay it back has a high time preference.
Since accepting a present sacrifice requires imagining a benefit in an uncertain future, human beings naturally tend toward present consumption; saving and planning require training and an awareness of the relationship between present and future.
If we take the above as true and add the democratic factor, the scenario is as follows: politicians, aware of the propensity for present consumption, offer voters all kinds of measures that look good at first glance but reveal their true nature upon reflection about their consequences over time.
When voters choose the short-term measures politicians offer, they enjoy their immediate benefits. When the time comes to pay the costs of those benefits, voters realize too late that the benefits do not justify the costs. They become furious and demand more short-term solutions from politicians, this time to patch up the consequences of careless economic policy. The only possible outcome is for the pressure cooker to explode. This is what is happening in France now, and what has happened in almost every crisis the country has experienced in the twenty-first century.
If a politician offered fiscal responsibility, spending austerity, and the other dreams of classical liberals, that politician would be crushed electorally by statist opponents, as has happened in practice and could already be anticipated through reasoning based on time preference. That is why the real problem facing the French is not the welfare state: it is the democracy they have glorified since the late eighteenth century. Neither they nor classical liberals can see how democracy harbors the seed of totalitarianism in every election.
Thus, seeking to shrink the welfare state, however noble, amounts to an effort comparable to Sisyphus’s daily struggle to push his heavy rock uphill. For finite beings such as ourselves, I find it far more worthwhile to devote our efforts to destroying the ultimate cause of statism rather than one of its symptoms, which can recover whenever the ballot boxes grow hungry.
One of libertarianism’s greatest thinkers, Murray Rothbard, wrote what has become a very famous line: “only libertarians are prepared to call taxation what it is: legalized and organized theft on a grand scale.” I propose adding the following appendix: “And democracy, a runaway train toward socialism and misery.”
