ArcaMax

PARIS — Every time I start thinking that maybe I could permanently retire my gas mask from the early 2020s Yellow Vest riots here in France — the one with the handy hole for a beverage straw — it’s time to drag it out again. This time, it’s because French teenagers are burning down their schools.

What do the kids want? Let’s get this out of the way right off the top. They mainly want shorter school days, because they feel that they work too much between their highly theoretical school hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., despite two-hour fully subsidized lunches and two weeks off every six weeks, and summers off. OK, so — no. You don’t. Let’s move on.

Judging by comments from folks on the American and international right-wing, it’s all about Europe’s bad immigration policies. As far as they’re concerned, France has simply imported a bunch of hoodlums from foreign countries who haven’t integrated. Wrong read. That’s not what’s happening here at all. And I say that as someone who’s also on the right.

Chalking up all the current cop-beating, acid-tossing, flame-throwing “youth” violence to misguided immigration lets an even bigger culprit off the hook: the left. And also laissez-faire French parenting that apparently now means letting your teenager practice Molotov cocktail bowling in the school’s courtyard.

As an immigrant myself, I live in a Parisian community where I’m in the racial minority in some respects, depending on the venue — like the local gym or on public transit — outnumbered by migrants from Africa and the Middle East, mostly. Some of whom have made a point of telling me that there would be no fooling around by their kids. They’re fully aware of the unfortunate stereotype here that their offspring are each destined to a life of leeching off state largesse, and they’ve made darn sure that their kids are well-educated and possess an actual work ethic.

You don’t even have to live here to see that the images of the rioting plastered all over social media feature kids of all backgrounds. Some could pass for the typical alpaca-coiffed hipster kid that you see in America these days. And conversely, amid the rioting, there are kids of markedly different origins seen helping an elderly person navigate the chaos, or enjoying a push-up contest with a cop. Or ethnic parents showing up at the schools to chase down their kid on campus amid the trash can bonfires. Somehow they still managed to recognize their child right through the ski mask.

A glaring omission from the coverage is the reality that these school-related demonstrations take place every single year at this time. As soon as the month-long paid summer vacation comes to an end, the leftist unions try to keep the party going well into September with street protests in favor of their pet causes. This year, they managed to rope the kids into it. That’s the only real difference this time around.

The unions do have some legitimate grievances — but they’re mostly the result of them constantly unloading into their own two feet and then whining that the bullets are capitalist-made.

For instance, they want higher salaries for teachers and civil servants. Great! How about cutting the amount of cash deducted through their income and social security taxes and union fees? In France, if an employer spends 60,000 euros in total to hire an employee, that person may only take home about 33,000 euros after employer and employee social-security contributions and income tax, depending on their circumstances — not even including union dues.

Where’s the lobbying to leave more in people’s pockets? Instead, the left is constantly just trying to get more cash out of higher earners. Which does little to pay the personal bills of lower-income folks, particularly when those high earners are the employers.

The left also lobbies for more and better resources and public infrastructure, including schools, while simultaneously expecting the government to pay for every cradle-to-grave perk known to humanity. At some point, the math stops mathing.

Speaking of unintended consequences — what did the state think would happen if it kept encouraging French parents to pop out kids only to start shipping them off to heavily government-subsidized “kiddie kennels” from the time they’re 10 weeks old? The whole culture acts like child-rearing is hassle-free. Maybe because it’s total strangers who are left handling the ad-hoc behavioral correction when these little darlings act out in public. Which is often.

The current narrative also likes to focus on the fact that the French state is redirecting all our cash into foreign wars instead of domestic priorities while conveniently ignoring that France and Europe are actually skimming the interest off European-held Russian frozen investments to fund their latest defense spending. What's next? Asking Moscow to chip in for the faculty lounge coffee maker? They don't even have the cash for what the left mistakenly thinks they can afford.

The French left’s anti-capitalist revolution isn’t going to come from demanding more handouts from the same state that they’ve been bleeding dry while their young proteges torch the very buildings that have any hope of ever teaching them that leftist magical math is hopelessly broken.