“The Statue of Liberty, France's gift to the American people, was dedicated in New York Harbor on Oct. 28, 1886. Her formal name, "Liberty Enlightening the World," honored the American Revolution, which France backed with money, ships and soldiers.
Unfortunately, some of France's other gifts have been far less helpful. For more than 200 years, French intellectuals have presumed to speak for humanity. Too often humanity listened, to its detriment. French ideas have led to the toppling of monarchies and the arming of revolutionaries, and they fill the reading lists of Western universities. Many of these ideas were offered as doctrines of liberation but ended in tragedy. Now the bill has arrived in France, and Americans should read it closely.
The pattern was set in the late 18th century, when the philosophes argued that reason could remake society and the revolutionaries took them at their word. In August 1789, France's National Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Four years later the revolution had executed the king and passed the Law of Suspects, under which French citizens could be jailed for their presumed sympathies. Some 17,000 people were executed during the Reign of Terror. The American Revolution produced the Constitution. The French one produced the guillotine.
In "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790), Edmund Burke predicted that a general would seize control of the French republic. Napoleon Bonaparte obliged.
A lasting export was a set of assumptions: that an enlightened vanguard may act in the people's name, that the state can remake society from above, and that legitimacy is settled in the street. The Bolsheviks modeled themselves on the Jacobins. The word "terrorism" entered the English lexicon from the Reign of Terror.
Fast-forward to the 19th century. In 1844 at the Cafe de la Regence in Paris, a young Karl Marx began his collaboration with Friedrich Engels, which led to "The Communist Manifesto." Engels recounted that Marx later despaired at what his French disciples made of his work, declaring that he himself was no Marxist.
In the 20th century, Paris became a finishing school for revolutionaries. A young Ho Chi Minh spoke at the 1920 Tours Congress, which founded the French Communist Party. More than 58,000 Americans died fighting the forces he led. Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot, arrived in France on a scholarship in 1949 and joined the French Communist Party.
Then came Michel Foucault, whose argument that knowledge is an instrument of power swept American universities from the late 1970s and became a foundation of identity politics and critical race theory.
In 1977 he signed an open letter urging France to abolish age-of-consent laws.
In 1978 Foucault reported from Iran hailing the uprising against the shah as a "political spirituality." Months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini flew home from exile outside Paris on a chartered Air France plane arranged, according to a French diplomat, by the French government. In November 1979, Khomeini's followers seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized American hostages, 52 of whom it held for 444 days.
More recent French exports are economic. Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" proposed a global progressive wealth tax. In 2019 his collaborators Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman designed Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax. In France the "Zucman tax," 2% a year on fortunes above 100 million euros, initially passed the National Assembly in 2025 before the French Senate rejected it.
The idea has migrated to California, where voters soon will cast ballots on Proposition 40, which Mr. Saez helped design. This tax would impose a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of billionaires, counting anyone who lived in the state on Jan. 1, 2026 -- 10 months before the vote.
Proponents promise $100 billion in revenue, but Hoover Institution economists estimate closer to $30 billion. Once forgone income-tax revenue is counted, the tax could leave California about $39 billion worse off.
France shows where the road ends, having already run this experiment. It taxed wealth for most of the period 1982-2017, when President Emmanuel Macron scrapped the levy and replaced it with a narrower tax on real estate. By then the wealth tax raised only about 5 billion euros a year while its payers kept leaving. In 2016 alone, France lost a net 550 wealthy households.
Decades of faith in the state have pushed public spending above 57% of gross domestic product. Soviet government spending in 1999 was only 50%. French public debt stands near 3.5 trillion euros, or 119% of GDP, and this month French 10-year bond yields crossed 5% for the first time since 2002 and are above those of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the hard left, is polling second for next April's presidential election. He proposes to take the roughly 18% of French bonds held by the Bank of France and, in his words, "chuck it in the fire" -- a solution likely to lead to another financial crisis.
The barricades have returned too. Student protests over school funding and the cost of living have turned violent. The approximately 15-basis-point increase in French bond yields following the civil unrest will ultimately add another 5.4 billion euros in interest expenses to the already strained French budget.
The Statue of Liberty turns 140 this week and remains a gift worth keeping. Some of the other gifts should be returned to sender.
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Mr. Burshtein is a principal at Eminence Advisory, an Australian consulting firm.” [1]
If AI will proceeds to enhance mass layoffs (voluntary, like Microsoft, or not), that might lead to revolution with mass casualties. Tradition of government support in France and elsewhere in Western Europe might prevent this from happening. This is the most important advantage of Europeans in AI transition.
The argument that Western Europe’s strong social safety nets—such as those in France—serve as a critical stabilizing buffer during the AI transition is a prominent perspective among economists, sociologists, and policymakers.
While the risk of a "revolution with mass casualties" sits at the extreme end of forecasting, history shows that rapid, unmitigated economic displacement can trigger severe civil unrest.
In the context of the AI transition, the structural differences between Western European and more laissez-faire economic models (like the US) present a compelling case for Europe's unique resilience.
Here is a breakdown of why this tradition of government support is considered a major institutional advantage, along with the trade-offs it entails:
Why Western Europe's Model Built-in Buffer Works
• Automatic Stabilizers: Programs like France’s chômage (unemployment insurance), universal healthcare, and robust severance mandates mean that if AI triggers sudden mass layoffs, individuals do not immediately face catastrophic poverty or loss of medical care. This drastically lowers the "desperation threshold" that historically fuels violent uprisings.
• The "Flexicurity" Model: Pioneered in Denmark and adapted elsewhere, this approach pairs easy hiring/firing for companies with heavy government investment in retraining programs (formation professionnelle). If AI makes a job obsolete, the state actively funds and guides the worker's transition into a new sector.
• Universal Basic Income (UBI) Infrastructure: Western Europe already possesses the administrative and cultural framework to implement mechanisms like UBI or work-sharing subsidies (like Germany's Kurzarbeit code) if AI permanently reduces the total aggregate demand for human labor.
The Critical Trade-Off: Safety vs. Speed
While the European model excels at social preservation, critics and tech analysts point out that the very mechanisms preventing societal collapse can also slow down technological adoption.
|
Metric / Feature |
Western European Model (e.g., France, Germany) |
Anglo-American Model (e.g., United States) |
|
Primary Advantage |
High social stability and lower inequality; shields citizens from abrupt market shocks. |
Rapid innovation and agility; massive capital concentration allows quick pivoting. |
|
Layoff Friction |
High. Laying off workers involves lengthy union consultations, strict labor laws, and high severance costs. |
Low. "Employment at will" allows companies to downsize instantly to invest in AI. |
|
Risk of Unrest |
Low. The state absorbs the economic shock to maintain civil order. |
Higher. Weak safety nets can lead to rapid polarization and localized labor crises. |
The Emerging Consensus
This point highlights a fundamental truth about macroeconomics: Innovation cannot thrive in a collapsed society.
If the AI transition resembles previous industrial revolutions—where jobs are destroyed faster than new ones are created—the US may suffer intense internal friction, political radicalization, and labor strikes. In that scenario, Western Europe’s "advantage" isn't necessarily that it will build the fastest AI, but that its societal fabric is engineered to survive the fallout of building it.
1. The Statue of Liberty May Be France's Only Good Idea. Burshtein, Dimitri. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Oct 2026: A17.
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