France: Tax Them & They Will Go.

France is in the Big State Keynesian end-game, perhaps the seeds to French Revolution II already sown. As surely as the West is devolving, again, to state oppression, there will ultimately be the fight for liberty: if there is one universal human narrative, it's not class struggle, but the struggle of an individual to be free – hopefully it won’t end for France as badly as the first time around, though that maybe an unrealistic hope, as long as man seems incapable of learning from history:

No one knows for the time being as to what exactly Bernard Arnault, France's richest man, intends to do in order to escape the punitively high 75% tax rate being proposed by President Francois Hollande.

But it should come as no surprise that he and scores of other wealthy French citizens are looking to organize their financial affairs differently so as to reduce their exposure to what amounts to little more than a smash-and-grab raid on the country's most successful businessmen that will in all likelihood prove counter-productive.

After all, we live in a world where different countries operate with different tax regimes, competing (I would hope) to attract businesses -- and therefore jobs -- to their shores. So if one country creates an environment where those who have done well for themselves are suddenly stung with a massive hike in the money the state wants to confiscate from them, they cannot be blamed for wanting to rearrange their finances, their domicile or even their nationality.

And, lest we forget, those with the greatest financial resources are those who will find it easiest to relocate in that way. Hence, in the past, we have spoken of a "brain drain" when tax in a particular jurisdiction has become excessively high. And when those individuals relocate, not only will the country's treasury miss the additional tax that they would have paid, but it most likely loses all the revenue that they were paying beforehand. That is one of the ways in which increasing a tax rate can reduce the total tax yield, thereby defeating the whole supposed object of the tax-raising exercise.

If there existed one free country in the West, anymore, then this is an opportunity waiting. Just advertise yourself as the lowest tax jurisdiction in the West, no income tax, no heavy-handed police state tactics put into law to destroy privacy and liberty, and become the home where the world’s rich come to live and spend their discretionary dollars.

It won’t be this immoral, moribund, mystical little snipe of a country we’ve voted in here though, run by a den of well-intentioned, superstitious thieves, for whom the civilising mind has been overthrown by the Taniwha, telling them to force free men back in time to the vicious heart of darkness of statism. Twenty first century, meet the excesses and atrocities of the twentieth century, where a bloody theocracy of God was replaced by a bloodier theocracy of state, and man thought he could have a free lunch, if only he could enslave his brother to his needs.