France’s public spending sits at roughly 57% of GDP, among the highest in Europe and well above the OECD average of about 41%. That is the opposite of austerity. Isn’t it funny that the French left continues to frame the country’s cost-of-living pressures and the recent wave of riots as the product of “austerity”? The claim does not survive contact with the numbers. Banque de France and Eurostat data place France just behind Finland and ahead of everyone else in the government-spending ranking. Most of the excess relative to euro-area peers comes from social protection, pensions and health in particular, and clearly not from underfunding core services. The practical effect of this large state is not lower prices for households. France maintains one of the OECD’s highest tax wedges on labor (around 47% for an average single worker). Employer social contributions are especially heavy, when an employer spends €100 on a worker, the employee often receives less than half that amount after mandatory charges. High VAT, production taxes, and a thicket of regulations further raise the cost of goods, housing, energy, and services. These burdens show up directly in the prices people face and in the gap between gross labor costs and take-home pay. Here is the real root-cause of the cost-of-living crisis. High spending has also not delivered efficiency. Studies from the IMF and others have repeatedly found that France sits well back from the efficiency frontier in education, health administration, and other public functions relative to peers that spend less. The result is a large public sector that consumes a great deal of resources while still generating complaints about service quality, exactly the pattern visible in the current unrest over schools and living costs. The cost-of-living crisis and the riots that followed it have real causes: energy price shocks, housing constraints, and stagnant real purchasing power for many households. Blaming austerity in one of Europe’s highest-spending countries deeply misdiagnoses the problem. An overgrown, highly taxed, and often inefficient state tends to make everyday goods and services more expensive, not less. Addressing that requires better targeting and productivity in public spending, not further expansion of a failed model. Aren’t French lefts simply entertaining in their naive ideological worldview? Believe it or not, but the unions seriously call for a general strike against “austerity“ on November 5. France is simply unreformable and will take down the entire Eurozone with it.