自由女神像是法国赠予美国人民的礼物，于1886年10月28日在纽约港揭幕。其正式名称“自由照亮世界”，旨在纪念美国独立战争，法国曾以资金、舰船和士兵支持这场战争。
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.
遗憾的是，法国的其他一些馈赠远没有那么有益。200多年来，法国知识分子自诩为人类的代言人。人类往往听从了他们的言论，却因此受害。法国思想导致君主制被推翻、革命者武装起来，并充斥着西方大学的阅读书单。许多思想本被作为解放的教条提出，最终却以悲剧收场。如今账单已送达法国，美国人应当仔细阅读。
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.
这一模式在18世纪末便已确立，当时启蒙思想家主张理性可以重塑社会，革命者深信不疑。1789年8月，法国国民制宪议会通过了《人权和公民权宣言》。四年后，革命处决了国王，并颁布了《嫌疑犯法》，据此法国公民可因被推定的同情倾向而入狱。恐怖统治期间约有1.7万人被处决。美国独立战争产生了宪法，法国大革命却产生了断头台。
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.
在《论法国革命》（1790年）中，埃德蒙·伯克预言一位将军将夺取法兰西共和国的控制权。拿破仑·波拿巴应验了这一预言。
In “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790), Edmund Burke predicted that a general would seize control of the French republic. Napoleon Bonaparte obliged.
一项持久的输出是一套假设：开明的先锋队可以以人民的名义行事，国家可以自上而下地重塑社会，合法性在街头决定。布尔什维克以雅各宾派为榜样。“恐怖主义”一词源自恐怖统治时期进入英语词汇。
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.
快进到19世纪。1844年，在巴黎的摄政咖啡馆，年轻的卡尔·马克思开始了与弗里德里希·恩格斯的合作，这段合作最终催生了《共产党宣言》。恩格斯回忆说，马克思后来对其法国门徒对他著作的解读感到绝望，宣称他自己并不是马克思主义者。
Fast-forward to the 19th century. In 1844 at the Café de la Régence 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.
到了20世纪，巴黎成了革命者的进修学校。年轻的胡志明在1920年图尔代表大会上发言，那次大会创立了法国共产党。超过5.8万名美国人在与他所领导的军队作战中丧生。萨洛特·萨，后来以波尔布特之名闻名，于1949年凭奖学金抵达法国，并加入了法国共产党。
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.
接着是米歇尔·福柯，他关于知识是权力工具的主张从1970年代末起席卷美国各大学，并成为身份政治和批判种族理论的基础之一。1977年，他签署了一封公开信，敦促法国废除同意年龄法律。
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.
1978年，福柯从伊朗发回报道，盛赞反对国王的起义是一种“政治灵性”。数月后，阿亚图拉鲁霍拉·霍梅尼乘坐一架法国航空公司的包机从巴黎郊外的流亡地飞回国内，据一名法国外交官说，这架飞机是法国政府安排的。1979年11月，霍梅尼的追随者占领了美国驻德黑兰大使馆，劫持了美国人质，其中52人被扣押了444天。
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.
法国较近期的出口则是经济方面的。托马斯·皮凯蒂的《21世纪资本论》提议征收全球累进财富税。2019年，他的合作者伊曼纽尔·赛斯和加布里埃尔·祖克曼设计了参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦提议的财富税。在法国，“祖克曼税”——对超过1亿欧元的财富每年征收2%——最初于2025年在国民议会获得通过，随后被法国参议院否决。
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, initially passed the National Assembly in 2025 before the French Senate rejected it.
这一想法已传至加利福尼亚州，选民即将就第40号提案（Proposition 40）投票，该提案由萨埃兹协助设计。这项税收将对亿万富翁的净资产一次性征收5%的税，纳税对象为2026年1月1日居住在该州的任何人——即投票前10个月。
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.
支持者承诺将带来1000亿美元收入，但胡佛研究所的经济学家估计更接近300亿美元。一旦计入放弃的所得税收入，这项税收可能使加利福尼亚州的财政状况恶化约390亿美元。
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.
法国展示了这条路的尽头，因为它已经做过这个实验。法国在1982年至2017年的大部分时期征收财富税，直到埃马纽埃尔·马克龙总统废除该税并以针对房地产的更窄范围税种取而代之。到那时，财富税每年仅筹集约50亿欧元，而其纳税人却持续外流。仅2016年一年，法国就净流失了550个富裕家庭。
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 a year while its payers kept leaving. In 2016 alone, France lost a net 550 wealthy households.
数十年对国家的信仰推动公共支出超过国内生产总值的57%。1999年苏联政府支出仅为50%。法国公共债务接近3.5万亿欧元，占GDP的119%，本月法国10年期债券收益率自2002年以来首次突破5%，并高于葡萄牙、意大利、希腊和西班牙。
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, 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.
极左翼领袖让-吕克·梅朗雄在明年4月总统大选的民调中排名第二。他提议拿走法国央行持有的约18%法国国债，用他的话说，“扔进火里烧掉”——这一举措极可能引发另一场金融危机。
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 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.
街垒也重现了。因学校经费和生活成本引发的学生抗议已演变为暴力冲突。骚乱导致法国债券收益率上升约15个基点，最终将给本已紧张的法国预算增加54亿欧元的利息支出。
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 in interest expenses to the already strained French budget.
自由女神像本周迎来140岁生日，仍是一份值得珍藏的礼物。但其他一些礼物，最好退还给寄件人。
The Statue of Liberty turns 140 this week and remains a gift worth keeping. Some of the other gifts should be returned to sender.
伯什泰因先生是澳大利亚咨询公司Eminence Advisory的负责人。
Mr. Burshtein is a principal at Eminence Advisory, an Australian consulting firm.