Jean-Ludovic Silicani is an honorary councilor of state.
For a few years, the dominant discourse, reinforced by the current health crisis, is that France would have succumbed to the neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon model, in which public services are reduced to the strict minimum and subject to a logic of profitability. This is also the feeling of many of our fellow citizens, manifested in particular during the movement of "yellow vests". However, the reality is very different: France has never devoted so many means to its public services, whether in terms of credits (56 percentage points of GDP, the highest level in the world) or public officials (5, 5 million, or 19% more in twenty years). So, whether we welcome it or deplore it, France is today, tied with Denmark, world champion in public services and the welfare state.
How to explain, apart from political postures, this gap between facts and feelings? It seems to me largely due to ignorance,
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