The scuffles in mostly peaceful France and what taxpayers receive in exchange for their $3,000/year security funding

CBS created a brilliant meme yesterday, characterizing what’s going on in France as “scuffles” on top of a photo of a car blazing like the wreck of the Hindenburg:

Of course, the original was quietly deleted by the Ministry of Truth and is no longer available, but some Deplorables at X archived the above as an image. It’s too bad that CBS wouldn’t own it, because it could have been as iconic as CNN’s “mostly peaceful” description of the U.S. summer of 2020:

France has a $25 billion/year national police budget, an additional multi-$billion/year local police budget, and a $57 billion/year military budget. INSEE says that 44% of the French are net taxpayers (not receiving more from the government than they pay in), i.e., about 30 million people. Each French taxpayer, therefore, is being charged about $3,000 per year for security, which is a lot of money in a country that is poorer per-capita than any U.S. state.

Nobody seems to be asking why France can’t be secured with this level of funding or, in other words, what do taxpayers get in exchange for the longer hours that they work to support the state?

Separately, who is behind these riots? It’s tempting to blame the fact that France, just like the U.S., chose to assemble a collection of humans from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies. But that ignores who might benefit from unrest in France. The Swiss are an obvious suspect. The wealthy French presumably already have their assets in the custody of Swiss banks so that they can escape in the event of a massive wealth confiscation or total societal collapse event (tough to leave immediately because, just like the U.S., France has a massive exit tax, but in an emergency Switzerland is a great option, especially because they won’t extradite someone over a demand by another country’s tax authority (this drove the U.S. IRS crazy, of course, in the Marc Rich case, which was finally resolved when Rich paid off Bill and Hillary Clinton in exchange for a pardon from Bill)). Then there are industrial competitors, to the extent that the French are still an industrial country. Someone who watches a video of the scuffles could decide to spend money on a factory in Poland, Hungary, Germany, or Switzerland rather than to invest more in France. (I still suspect the Florida Realtors of being the main backers of Ayatollah Mamdani’s campaign to take over NYC. If my suspicion is correct, the ROI has been stunning.)

Israel is also a good all-purpose villain (just ask Harvard, Columbia, and anyone who voted for Zohran Mamdani!). French Jews are much better educated than the typical immigrants to Israel (recall that the largest subpopulation within Israel is made of Jews who were driven out, after having their assets confiscated, from Arab-Muslim countries). To the extent that recent riots turn into a pogrom (see below for an X post about how Jewish shops in Marseille were burned; there have also been reports of synagogues damaged (example)), Israel could benefit from an influx of people with a world-class education. On the third hand, however, the median age of a French Jew is 53. The smartest, best-educated, and most energetic French Jews might already have emigrated out of what is now a Jew-hating pro-Hamas society with a moribund economy. American progressives say that the U.S. benefits when a disabled 80-year-old arrives on our shores, but I don’t think too many Israelis share this point of view.

French journalist Paul Amar:

“They came prepared. They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners.

In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren’t” pic.twitter.com/zudahbmw7p

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 18, 2026

Temporary Israeli Greta Thunberg is on the scene (Guardian):

A slightly newer Guardian story notes “Protesters hold the French and Palestinian flags as they stand on the statue of the Place de la République in Paris”:

Finally, let’s have a look at some documentary footage of the overall effects on Paris: