By Pat Buchanan
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
When Socialist President Francois Hollande took office,
he swiftly made good on his pledge to raise the top tax rate on Frenchmen who
earn a million euros a year -- to 75 percent.
The regime would now confiscate three of four dollars
that the most successful Frenchmen earned. Paris also imposes a wealth tax on
assets worth more than $1.7 million.
This broke it for Gerard Depardieu, the famed actor and
bon vivant who has performed in scores of films in such roles as Jean Valjean
in "Les Miserables" and Cyrano de Bergerac.
Depardieu put his Paris mansion up for sale, crossed the
border into the Belgian village of Nechin, gave up his French passport and is
renouncing his French citizenship. A tiny community of French already reside in
Nechin, a kilometer beyond the reach of Hollande's tax police.
Depardieu says that this past year 85 percent of all he
earned went for taxes. Over a 45-year career, he contends, almost $200 million
in income has been taxed away by the French government.
"I don't like the rich," Hollande has said.
The sentiment is reciprocated. One French radio station
claims that 5,000 French citizens have fled since he took office.
Hollande's regime, writes Edward Cody of The Washington
Post, has all but declared Depardieu a traitor. Labor Minister Michel Sapin
calls him an example of "personal degradation." Culture Minister
Aurelie Filippetti charges him with "deserting the battlefield in a war
against the economic crisis."
"When someone loves France, he should serve,"
says Hollande, calling Depardieu "pathetic" and
"unpatriotic."
Which raises a question for Americans. For our revolution
was born of a tax rebellion against the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties and the
tea tax that led to the Boston Tea Party.
Purpose of these taxes: Have the colonies pay a fair
share of the cost of the French and Indian War, in which British soldiers had
driven the enemies of the colonies out of the Ohio Valley.
But when farmers in Pennsylvania rebelled against a
whiskey tax to defray the cost of our Revolutionary War, President Washington
marched out with 13,000 militia to crush that tax rebellion.
While the socialist left has come down hardest on
Depardieu, he is well within a tradition of the cultural left.
As The Associated Press' Thomas Addison reports, when the
British top tax rate was 95 percent in the 1960s, the Beatles' George Harrison
wrote "Taxman" with the lyrics, "There's one for you, 19 for
me."
In 2005, Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr moved to Monaco,
where the income tax rate is zero.
Sean Connery, the first "James Bond," departed
Britain in the 1960s for Spain and the Bahamas, writes Addison, "another
spot with zero income tax." In the 1970s, his successor as 007, Roger
Moore, also chose tax exile in Monaco. In those years of confiscatory tax rates
in England, the Rolling Stones relocated to Southern France.
What does this teach us?
That socialism, the forced redistribution of income and
wealth from those who produce it to those who do not, eventually forces a man
to choose between himself and his family -- and his government.
Socialism creates and exacerbates a conflict in
loyalties. A regime that takes three of every four dollars a man earns is an
enemy of what that man works to accomplish for himself and his family.
Mitt Romney was castigated for keeping bank accounts in
the Caymans, Bermuda and Switzerland. Yet countless U.S. companies leave
profits abroad to evade U.S. taxes.
Californians flee to Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and Colorado
to escape Golden State taxes. Are they disloyal to their home state, or are
they doing what is right by their families, their first responsibility?
With federal income taxes on America's most successful
rising today to almost 40 percent, New York City residents will also pay a top
rate of 12 percent to the state and city plus a 9 percent sales tax on their
purchases, plus payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security, plus property
taxes, auto taxes, gas taxes and cigarette taxes.
For many successful Americans, over half of all they earn
is now taken by government. And reading The New York Times' year-end editorial,
these may soon be seen as the good old days.
The Times urges Obama to consider sweeping new taxes to
"reduce income inequality." Among the revenue raisers for which it
urges consideration: Almost tripling the capital tax rate to 40 percent,
capping deductions for high earners, restoring the estate tax to confiscatory
levels, higher tax rates or surcharges on multimillion-dollar incomes and
raising the corporate tax rate -- already the highest in the world.
"All that would be only a start," says the
Times. A carbon tax, a value-added tax, a financial transactions tax should all
be looked at.
Can a man love his country and hate its government? Of
course. Ask Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Ask the patriots of '76.
This un-American and egalitarian fanaticism rearing its
head today may one day force just such a question upon American patriots.
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