In this episode, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the current state of France, exploring its pension crisis, demographic challenges, immigration policies, and political turmoil. They compare France’s situation to other European countries, discuss the impact of government benefits, and debate the effectiveness of recent reforms. The conversation also touches on cultural differences, personal experiences in France, and broader themes of government dysfunction and societal change. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be talking about just. How cooked France is, just for some statistics that people might be surprised about is in France, your average pensioner makes more money in terms of like cost of living, adjusted money than your average worker in the country. In. In France, 57, sorry, 57% of people are net beneficiaries of the government. 43% pay into the government. Oh no. France is already past the point. And I said this is a point where democracies begin to break down where the average citizen is being paid by the government to exist. And we’re going to look at where this has led to downstream collapse, in just a second here. Also very fun. What I love about diving into France and we’ve had episodes diving into the UK and diving into Germany, and now we’re diving into France, is each country is completely cooked in like its own way. It’s almost like Europe got to be like [00:01:00] the captain planet of evil and country vices. And you know, the UK is like. I’ll arrest people for memes. You know, like there was the guy who was arrested in Scotland for literally painting Islam can be questioned on his wall. And they, the police were like, no, it cannot the girl who, who well, we’re not gonna go into that. All of that. You can, you can go to our video where we point out that the only reason a country would ban the flying of its own flag is if it was under occupation. There’s no other reason to ban the flying of your own country’s flag, because presumably you do that in support of your government, right? If the government sees that as an attack on them, and this usually happens under occupation, like France under occupation, you ban it. So the UK has got its draconian speech laws and, and, and all of that. Then in Germany you have like a secret police force of like brown shorts that literally label mainstream political parties as terrorist organizations and monitor in harass mainstream like people [00:02:00] who are to the left of like the United States president or us, for example, as being. Political. Mind you, this is a political party, the a FD that is run by a lesbian in an interracial relationship. So yeah, not exactly that extreme, right? Then we get to France, right? And what is their nature of terribleness? They’re actually pretty good about not arresting people for stupid things. And they’re actually pretty good about not like spying on the quote unquote far right party, which we’ll go into like lap pen’s party or bullying them. But they have the curse of the French, which means, oh no. The problem with France is that it’s full of French people. And French people have completely unrealistic expectations around what to expect and. They are treating. Like if, if you, if you watch, and what we’ll go into a bit is this recent OD of you know, Francis current Prime Minister Macron [00:03:00] constantly trying to get the retirement age raged from 62 to 64. Now 64 would be a very young retirement age, globally speaking. And yeah. What, Simone Collins: let’s see, was it, is it in the USA, It is 67 for social security. Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so the point being is he wants to raise it a a moderate amount, and we’ll go into the data here, but like anyone could tell you that the system’s gonna be insolvent in just like a decade and a half if they don’t raise it. And literally this is what keeps breaking the government. And when I say break, I mean literally they’ve been through like four sitting whatevers like head of the governments in like the past few years because they, they pee everything to like step down the ministers Simone Collins: right. Malcolm Collins: You know, whatever, because France is Simone Collins: a president and a Prime minister and it’s, they’re, they’re churning through Prime Ministers this point. Yeah. We’ll, we’ll Malcolm Collins: get to it. Yeah. And, and the core reason is, and the core reason that everything about Macrons blew up, even though he tried to side with the lefties, is just over this retirement age thing. And what makes this so funny to me. [00:04:00] Is the system won’t even exist in like a decade and a half if they don’t make this change. Right. And this change will, I feel like even if Simone Collins: they do two years doesn’t seem this yearly enough. Yeah. What change Estimated Malcolm Collins: to increase its lifespan by one decade. Maybe if they do it immediately. And so they’re not even like arguing for like this being a permanent thing. Th
