If there’s one immutable law of economics, it’s that rich people don’t take socialist extortion lying down. They take it running away.
France’s best-known actor is the latest among those Frenchmen who’ve struck a blow for sound economics by moving to Belgium and ‘giving France the finger’, in the colourful phrase of Benoît Hamon, the Consumption Minister.
Now a country that offers that job description, along with Minister for Equality, Minister for Women, Minister for Culture or Minister for Sport, thereby forfeits any claim to the loyalty of her citizens. In case you may think I’m being Francophobic, our own (mostly Conservative!) government has all those positions. The only exception is Minister for Consumption, and that probably only because of the tubercular connotations.
When Hollande became President, he famously declared, ‘I don’t like the rich.’ Now he’s finding the feeling is mutual.
People who earn a lot of money will not put up with having a great chunk of it taxed at 75 percent. Nor will they welcome Hollande’s huge increases in both inheritance and capital-gains taxes.
It’s a sign of their desperation that they choose to drive a few miles and settle in Belgium, which has to be described as hardship duty. Still, Belgium may be the butt of non-PC jokes both in France and in Holland, and it may possess the ugliest capital in Western Europe, but it has lower taxes on both income and capital gains – and no wealth tax at all.
Performing artists find Belgium particularly attractive, for they pay a mere 18-percent income tax there. Dépardieu will thus pay €180,000 on the second million euros he’ll earn next year, as opposed to €750,000. The difference of €570,000 makes his decision a no-brainer – and this without even taking into account another few hundred thousand he’ll save on his first million.
Socialists everywhere always froth at the mouth whenever their prey slips between their fingers. For example, Dave and his stooges are trying their best to criminalise tax avoidance, as opposed to tax evasion which is already against the law. Since no law against tax shelters has so far been passed, Dave and George have turned this into a moral crusade.
Now these spivocrats evoking morality is a real turn-up for the bookkeepers. It’s a bit like Sir John Major advocating marital fidelity or Gordon Brown supporting balanced budgets. But socialists, whatever they call themselves in public, have their own take on morality: whatever is good for them is moral, and vice versa.
That’s why it isn’t surprising that the French variety, and it is among the most revolting, had to outfroth even Mr Hamon.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault explained the situation to the best of his ability, which is alas not saying much. The rich, he orated, wish to escape the socialists’ clutches ‘because they want to get even richer.’
Heaven forbid. People wanting to improve their condition? Whatever next? Before you know it, some Frenchmen will begin to want jobs rather than welfare, and then the socialists will really be in trouble. What people ought to be striving for is poverty spread equally across all classes, except the political class of course.
It doesn’t occur to this lot that people like Dépardieu, who keeps much of the French cinema industry in jobs; his new neighbours the Mulliezes, who employ 270,000 in their Auchan supermarkets; or Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man who has applied for Belgian citizenship, help the very economy the socialists are so busily destroying. The same can be said for the hundreds of thousands of other enterprising Frenchmen who are fleeing France as if it were in the grips of the Black Death.
The net fiscal effect of Hollande’s policies will therefore be negative. But this simple logic is beyond the grasp of French lefties or, for that matter, ours. Vince Cable, for example, advocates the 50-percent tax bracket because it ‘sends an important message.’ True enough, it does. And the message is ‘Run!’
France has sunk even deeper into the socialist morass than we have. Witness the fact that patron (boss or company owner) is one of the worst insults in the French language. And witness the shrill screams coming from the French political class at the moment, whose fervour pitch hits notes so far unreachable even by our Milibandits.
Thus Libération called Dépardieu a ‘drunken, obese petit-bourgeois reactionary’, which was rude, irrelevant and at least half-wrong.
Incidentally, our own Telegraph shouldn’t be referring to that French rag as a ‘left-leaning daily’. The Times, or in France Le Figaro and Le Monde, are left-leaning, gentlemen. Libération is Trotskyist, which is not a pejorative term but a factual description based on the paper’s editorial policy, party allegiance of its staff and the way it’s financed.
Socialist MP Yann Galut called for the actor to be stripped of his nationality, and if there’s no law to do that then the law must be changed. This is surprisingly moderate for that lot. Why not kidnap Dépardieu the way the French counterintelligence used to kidnap OAS insurgents? He has only settled a couple of miles across the border, and, unlike those OAS people, he’s probably not watching his back.
The operation would be as easy as pie. Grab the actor, stuff him into a car boot, bring him to Paris and put him on trial. May I suggest treason as the charge? It’s already being bandied about in the press, so the groundwork has been done.
And if no law exists to that effect, pass it straight away and make it retroactive. Why stand on formality? The founders of the French republic never did.
These are our partners in the EU, ladies and gentlemen. One can understand Dave’s affection for it: birds of a feather, and all that.