Decades of bloated government, entitlements, subsidies, and mass migration have destroyed Europe’s competitiveness and growth, all paid for with ever-rising taxes and more debt. They have also created enormous social discontent. Taxpayers are exhausted, and the recipients of subsidies are looting and vandalizing the streets. The flames in French cities are the bill that is arriving.

On Saturday 17 October, France burned again. What began as marches against the cost of living and the state of public schools turned into the worst violence the country has seen in decades. According to the French government, 550,000 people took to the streets, 1,200 were arrested, and 150 police officers were injured. In Limoges, rioters set the city hall ablaze; in Marseille, they broke into the city hall; and in Lyon, they torched the tourist office. AFP reporters on the ground described scenes more intense than the 2023 riots and the Yellow Vest protests of 2018 and 2019, six months before a presidential election. Major cities, including Paris, Marseille, and Lille, suffered enormous commercial damage with smashed shopfronts, shattered glass, and ransacked retail spaces. In Bordeaux, Mayor Thomas Cazenave reported that up to 100 stores were looted in his city alone.

The riot images will be explained away as the work of a violent fringe, and it will be said that the mob that loots luxury boutiques and supermarkets certainly does not represent the hundreds of thousands who marched peacefully. However, the anger is real, and it has a cause.

Europe has spent half a century building the largest welfare state in the world on the promise that government could guarantee prosperity, security, and equality for everyone. That model has completely failed, and the people who were promised everything are discovering that the state only delivers stagnation and impoverishment.

France is the clearest example of what “democratic socialism” does to a rich nation. France is the most state-heavy economy in the European Union. French public spending reached 57.2% of GDP in 2025, the second highest in the EU and 7.7 points above the average. Its tax burden is among the highest in the world, at 45.3% of GDP in 2024, behind only Denmark in the EU. Public debt rose to 119% of GDP in the second quarter of 2026, and the deficit stood at 5.1% of GDP in 2025. If big government, high taxes, and immigration delivered prosperity and social peace, France would be paradise. Instead, the protesters on the streets of Paris are demanding more of the same medicine that made them sick.

The welfare machine eats the economy.

France is not an extreme or single example. The disease is continental. Government expenditure in the European Union reached 49.5% of GDP in 2025 and 49.8% in the euro area. Half of the economy is directly controlled by the state, and much of the rest is regulated, subsidized, or taxed to the point of exhaustion. Social protection benefits alone reached 4,925 billion euros in 2024, 27.3% of the EU’s GDP, after growing 6.9% in a single year while nominal GDP grew only 4.4%.

Add the subsidies. European governments spent 340 billion euros on energy subsidies in 2024 and another 168 billion euros in state aid. Governments first make energy expensive with taxes, regulations, and ideological mandates, then subsidize the very costs they created, and finally borrow to pay for the subsidies. Citizens pay three times, as consumers, as taxpayers, and as the future holders of the debt.

The debt is the inevitable consequence. Greece ended 2025 with public debt at 146.1% of GDP, Italy at 137.1%, France at 115.6%, Belgium at 107.9%, and Spain at 100.7%. And those figures hide the largest liability of all. According to Eurostat, the pension entitlements already accrued in social insurance schemes reach 500% of GDP in Spain, 462% in Austria, 438% in Italy, 397% in France, and 347% in Germany, almost all of them unfunded, according to Eurostat. These are promises that no government can keep without crushing the next generation with taxes or destroying the purchasing power of the currency.

Germany, once the engine of Europe, now transfers 127.4 billion euros from the federal budget to its pension system in 2026, rising to 132 billion in 2027. Spain’s Social Security debt has almost quadrupled since 2018, from 34,888 million to 136,176 million euros, and social contributions cover pension payments only until early October. The welfare state now lives on borrowing against the future rather than on what the economy produces.

Competitiveness destroyed

There is no free lunch. Every euro of spending must be paid for by the productive economy, and Europe’s productive economy is suffocating. The International Monetary Fund expects the euro area to grow just 1.1% in 2026, compared with 2.3% in the United States, with France at a miserable 0.4% and Italy at 0.8%. Labor productivity per hour worked in the EU stood at only 78.5% of the US level in 2024, and in 2025 it grew just 0.4% compared with 1.6% in the United States.

German industrial production has fallen every year since 2022, and the BDI industry association no longer expects a recovery in 2026, only stagnation. Output in energy-intensive sectors is at its lowest level since the end of 2023. That is what happens when energy is made artificially expensive, labor is taxed at confiscatory rates, regulation multiplies, and capital flees.

Inflation makes the situation even worse. Euro area inflation rose to 3.8% in September 2026, with energy prices up 18.9% year-on-year. Governments that printed and borrowed their way through every crisis now discover that the real wages of their citizens cannot keep up. The cost-of-living crisis that sent hundreds of thousands into French streets has its roots in decades of too much government, not too little.

Mass migration worsens the situation.

Instead of reforming, European governments chose to import the illusion of growth. On January 2025, 46.7 million people living in the EU had been born outside it, 10.4% of the population, and the number of non-EU citizens rose by 1.6 million in a single year to 30.6 million. Immigration may be a powerful engine of prosperity when it is carefully selected for skills and enters flexible labor markets with low taxes and limited welfare. Europe did the opposite. It combined mass migration with rigid labor markets, enormous taxes, and the most excessive welfare benefits on the planet.

The result was predictable. Many immigrants have no incentive to adapt or participate and are trapped in low-wage jobs and welfare dependency. Thus, public services were stretched beyond capacity, housing became unaffordable in the major cities, and integration failed in entire neighborhoods. Governments used headline GDP inflated by population growth to hide stagnant income per person, while workers saw their wages fall in real net terms as inflation and their taxes rise. This is the evidence of a model that promised everything to everyone and delivered disappointment to all.

When you create a state big enough to promise everything, it delivers almost nothing but takes away everything it can.

Angry taxpayers, entitled mobs

Democratic socialism created two angry Europeans. The first is the angry taxpayer, the middle-class worker, the small business owner, and the self-employed professional who pays more every year and receives worse services, longer waiting lists, unaffordable housing, security problems, and a pension system that will not be there when they retire. The second is entitled Europe, a constituency that has been taught for decades that the state owes it everything and responds to inevitable disappointment with rage and violence.

Both are victims of the same lie. Politicians promised that they could raise taxes on the rich, borrow without limit, and expand entitlements forever with no consequences. They told voters that someone else would pay. Now that someone else, the productive economy, is exhausted. Capital is leaving, young talent is emigrating, industry is closing, and the bill is landing on the middle class and on young people who will inherit the debt.

What Europe needs is less state. Another subsidy, another tax on “the rich” or another emergency fund financed with joint debt will only deepen the crisis. The way forward is to cut unproductive spending, reduce the tax burden on labor and investment, end the subsidy culture that keeps the economy zombified, liberalize markets, and abandon the ideological mandates that have made European industry uncompetitive.

Europe needs a migration policy designed for prosperity rather than electoral calculation, selective, linked to employment, and not to welfare entitlement. It needs a gradual transition from unfunded pay-as-you-go pensions to capitalized systems in which workers own their savings, as Sweden and the Netherlands have shown is possible.

Citizens need to realize the truth, which is that the state does not create wealth; it consumes it.

The riots in France are a warning to America. When a society is told for decades that it is entitled to everything and then discovers that the state is broke, the result is not solidarity but violence.

Democratic socialism promised Europe equality and security. It delivered stagnation, inflation, debt, and rage. If America adopts this system, it will follow the same path of misery and desperation. The sooner Europe abandons democratic socialism, the sooner it can recover the prosperity that made it the envy of the world.