"In my opinion, what you need to do to be more effective on this forum, as opposed to being a lightening rod, is to supress that French hauteur a yours a bit more. Maybe it comes from having noble blood or something, and therefore being genetically more fit to lead. You remember that posts of yours don't you?"
Oh dear!
Well, of course I remember my posts.
If I am a "lightning rod", I do not have that sense. I receive many FreepMails thanking me for my contribution and perspective. Everyone is probably of noble blood, were one to go back far enough. I have presented things from an unabashedly French perspective, but focused on the structure of laws and how things come out. This has been characterized as "hate" but that is absurd. Or rather, it is projection. I have expressed no hate. But I am hated, by some, and am a lightning rod by the simple fact of being French. Anyway, I do not so much worry about "being effective". I have learned on my travels that the only real effectiveness and power that I - or anybody else - has is either positional, which is to say: derives from legal authority, or economic, which is to say: derives from the fact that I have money and others are willing to please me in order to get some of it.
"Your posited paradigm of France as a veritable Elysian Field of privacy is a bit much. When I was on the road in France, a jendarme or whatever you call them, stopped me for no apparent reason, and asked for my passport and where I was going and why, all in French of course. It was a rather laborious conversation. The cop was not nasty, just very firm and nosey. That has never happened to me in the States, ever. One might wonder if the vaunted privacy rights you assert only apply to Frenchmen in France, but since I was in Normandy, where the French tend to be of white bread Anglo Saxon stock, in appearance I think I fit in rather well. And of course, my passport was required to be presented in every hotel I checked into."
No, France is not a paradise of privacy. There are national identity cards, and when you are in public, the authorities can indeed demand to see your papers. When you check into a hotel, of course, you must show your passport because that information is entered into Interpol, so that the police can track the location of all foreign travellers in Europe. But I was not referring to all privacy in all cases. I focused on the specific case of the house. Your home IS more protected in France than in America. It cannot be taken so easily. Likewise, your privacy is more protected against the intrusion of other private people or the media. Likewise in the case of lawsuits. Obviously when you are out driving on the road, the authorities can stop you and ask for your papers. Usually they do not. France is not an Elysian Field of privacy. But on things that are particularly bad in the USA law, France is more private.
"By the way, are the French as incorrigible as they used to be as tax cheats? Just curious. You seem to have alluded to that when chatting about the extra curricular benefits "privacy" of papers and all that. I don't like tax cheats."
The bigger taxes in France cannot be cheated upon. The TVA is added into purchases. This cannot be gotten around. The habitation tax cannot be gotten around. Nor can the social charges that are taken from a salaried worker's paycheck. It is in the form of cash payments that there is tax cheating in France. Probably the greatest tax cheating is on the wealth tax. In theory, persons of great wealth are supposed to pay a tax based upon their net worth each year, including their artwork, jewels, antique furniture: all things of value. There is, perhaps, a tendency among such fortunate people to not desire to list all of their ancestral jewels and paintings and books and furniture of value so that it can be assessed and taxed. For less well off people, there is the television tax. There is, perhaps, a tendency among people not to pay the tax on their televisions. And there is, perhaps, a reliance among such people on the fact that the authorities can only with extreme difficulty gain access to the interior of a private residence.
One of the hallmarks of a sane code of taxation is that it should not be too difficult to administer nor to enforce, but also that the temptations to cheat should not be so obvious.
I, of course, do not know a soul who cheats on his taxes in France. Nor, I expect, does anyone else. Certainly if a person did do such a thing, he would never admit to it, so how would one ever know?
Well at least the soaring French privacy rhetoric has been cut back to the home, which is the object of the SCOTUS decision. The merit of that assertion of yours, I have no anecdotal evidence, since I don't own or reside in a home on French soil Retreating from the fragile dangling limb one chose to inhabit, is a very wise move. In Anglo Saxon parlence (that vulger language), it is called, cutting one's losses.