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Friday, 13 July 2012
That holiday home in France just got costlier
Here in my French fastness, where the wild boar are even more destructive to the garden than the drunks who scream and shout on Friday nights outside my English home, I received the news of François Hollande’s proposed taxes on foreign-owned second houses with what the French call flegme. I don’t rent it out, didn’t buy it as a speculation, and don’t intend to sell it, so taxes on rental income and capital gains will not affect me. Besides, a reduction in the size of an anticipated profit is not quite the same thing as a loss. But I am more fortunately placed than many who are not in a position to keep their sangfroid in the face of Mr Hollande’s announcement.
My house is as we all imagine one in rural France to be: isolated and peaceful, a clear stream babbling through its large garden, the cicadas singing and the bees busy with the lavender. Alas, the peaches are now finished, as are the cherries and wild strawberries, but the apricots and apples are still ripening.
Mr Hollande’s proposals regarding such properties are entirely consistent with his programme, which is to decrease the French budget deficit without reducing the number of his core constituents, the public sector workers. His political calculation is sound, since 75 per cent of French students would like to be civil servants. And on his own admission he does not like the rich, presumably as defined in the normal way by haters of the rich; that is to say, those with more money than they.
The President is no believer in the Laffer curve, according to which, after a certain level, revenues decline as taxes increase. He takes a more citrus fruit view of the matter: you squeeze the lemon until the pips squeak. This is good politics: demagogic taxes on the rich are always popular in countries where most people hope to get more out of the state than they put into it. It is like running a lottery with compulsory contributions in which 55 or 60 per cent of the ticket holders are winners. Such a lottery will always be popular.
Most British people come to France, however, not to avoid taxes, but to avoid their fellow countrymen, especially the younger ones. In France, even the most uncouth people address you as “monsieur”, not “mate”. The burglar who broke into my mother-in-law’s flat in Paris, not expecting her to be there, withdrew with a courteous “Excusez-moi, madame”. An English burglar would have bound and gagged her.
First published in The Telegraph.
Posted on 07/13/2012 10:26 AM by Theodore Dalrymple
Comments
13 Jul 2012
 reactionry
Bildungsroman Fingers
Dr. Dalrymple could have noted that an Italian burglar also might have been polite. While, as noted recently by Brenda Walker, an Italian politician has called for separate buses for women, that had little to do with the "rude piggy-men" (here referring to Latin America, rather than give-them-a-pinch-and-they'll-take-it-with-a-smile Italy) ethnic Italian males and much more to do with Muslim immigrants. As was lewdly limned in the coming-of-age/Bildungsroman Eurotrip (a saga centered around a young American's search for a Made-In-Germany maiden who's built like a brick outhouse on the Siegfried Line), based upon Margaret Celestron Meade's* work of astronomical proportions, The Age of Coming in Some Moans, the behavior of Roman men on public transportation is beyond reprobate - I mean - reproach:
* See also David Cameroon's assertion "that one man's German Equatorial Mount is another man's missionary-on-top/native-on-the-bottom" and that "one man's Mead is another man's virgin" and AE Housmadam's "give crowns and pounds, but not your heart away to guineas."
Tags: David Cameron, German Equatorial Africa, sorry about all the dashes above; Teddy Roosevelt might belittled me as a "hyphenated American," Meade, Celestron, Orion, Tele Vue & Takahashi telescopes, German Equatorial mounts, Altazimuth mounts, for small potatoes one can buy a much larger Dobsonian mount, also see VN's The Potato Elf and Frederic Dobson who mounts the much larger Nora
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