Then again, the health service that used to be the toast of Francophiles is overwhelmed, understaffed, and “on the brink of collapse,” according to a report in The Guardian. French universities, while cheap, are overcrowded, underfunded, and notoriously mediocre: “Too easy to get in and too easy to get out,” as one local observer put it. French workers exercise their right to strike roughly seven times more frequently than German workers do, and 125 times more than Swiss ones.

As for income inequality, France is certainly much less unequal than the U.S. But France’s top 1 percent still held 22 percent of the country’s wealth at the beginning of 2018. That was despite a draconian effort by the previous Socialist government to impose a super-tax on high earners. It raised scant revenue while accelerating the exodus of the rich. Like many European attempts at imposing a wealth tax, it was quickly repealed.

All of this should stand as a stark warning to Democrats. France has the highest overall tax take among O.E.C.D. countries (46.9 percent of G.D.P.), the highest rate of government spending, (56.38 percent of G.D.P.), the highest rate of safety-net spending, and the third highest rate of pension spending.

Whatever else all this taxing and spending might be doing, it’s clearly not creating jobs or prosperity. As for making people happy, France doesn’t break the top 20 in this year’s World Happiness Report. Even Mexico ranks higher.

I don’t mean this column to be relentlessly negative about France, a great nation with an almost unsurpassed depth of culture and capacity for excellence. If anything, it’s a tribute to the French that they continue to punch above their weight in so many fields, when the weight of the state lies so heavily on their backs.

But as far as models go, the story of France’s economy in the past 40 years is mostly one of bad turns, thwarted hopes, and forgone opportunities. Americans should not imagine that we can walk down that same familiar cul-de-sac and not hit the same dismal dead end.

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