Monthly Archives: July 2012

That holiday home in France just got costlier

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In the Telegraph, Dalrymple discusses Francois Hollande’s proposal to increase taxes on “foreign-owned second houses”:


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.

Dalrymple says it will probably work too, since most Britons (at least) do not move to France for low taxes but “to avoid their fellow countrymen, especially the younger ones”.

Read it here

Protesting Too Much

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In a short piece in City Journal, Dalrymple notes the hypocrisy with which the British government views French versus British tax avoiders:

There is surely something inconsistent about a government that welcomes foreigners fleeing their own country to avoid tax, but excoriates its own citizens who do everything legally possible to do the same. The inconsistency can, perhaps, be explained by the fact that 50 percent of the population is now dependent, directly or indirectly, on the government for its income. That is why the government will never draw any general conclusion from this paradox.

Moral Preening and Capital Punishment

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Dalrymple’s second piece for the Library of Law and Liberty discusses the death penalty:
A feeling of moral superiority is often compensation for the lack of any other kind of superiority, and has the advantage that it can never be decisively disproved. With respect to capital punishment, Europeans feel morally superior to Americans because they have abolished it as a relic of judicial barbarism. So complete has been the revolution in moral sensibility that they speak as if the French foreswore the guillotine before the Roman invasion rather than in 1981, against the majority opinion of the public.
The question of capital punishment has long agitated the minds of intellectuals…

The Seen and the Unseen in Our Social Liberation

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Dalrymple has two pieces in the Library of Law and Liberty, a new venue for his work. The first is a criticism of a book review that he says exposes the reviewer’s immoderate views on marriage before women’s liberation. He highlights the recent case of one Shane Jenkin, an Englishman who attacked and nearly killed his girlfriend, and imagines the criticisms one might receive if one made similar criticisms about modern sexual relations, post-women’s lib, from that isolated case:
If someone were to take the case of Shane Jenkin… as being emblematic of relationships between men and women in our time, he or she would almost certainly be accused immediately of golden-ageism: that is to say, the unwarranted and rather naïve belief that at some time in the recent past things were so much better that such terrible things were never done by men to women. He or she would be accused of wanting to return to that supposedly golden age, either openly or surreptitiously, of wanting to roll back the reforms of, say, the past half century.
But of course the reviewer of the book by Forester is guilty of a mirror-image attitude, that until those reforms all was horribly violent and repressive from the woman’s point of view. Thanks to those reforms, nothing like it is known today. This is not the historiography of the golden-age, but of the leaden-age.

A philosopher for the Facebook generation

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I’d like to post this Telegraph piece on Facebook, but I don’t want to offend anybody. Would Rousseau call that a sign of insincerity, or proof of my innate goodness?



Rousseau was genuinely revolutionary in the way in which he overturned the notion of Original Sin. For most thinkers before him the question was how Man was to be made good, given his bad or imperfect nature; for Rousseau the question was how Man became bad, given his natural goodness (his answer was society). He did not believe in a return to Nature, exactly, but sought the political means to restore Man to his natural goodness. Personally, I think Rousseau was disastrously mistaken in this; in my opinion, the limitation of the bad in Man is infinitely more important and less sinister politically than the search for the good. When you have limited the bad, the good can take care of itself.
 
Rousseau was also the unwitting founder of the psychology of the Real Me, that is to say of the inner core of each of us that remains immaculate and without sin, however the external person actually behaves. The inner core, the Real Me, is good; what might be called the Epiphenomenal Me, that is to say the one that loses his temper, tells lies, eats too much, etc, is the result of external influences upon him. In this way a monster of depravity may preserve a high opinion of himself and continue his depravity; nothing he can do can deprive him of the natural goodness first espied by Rousseau.
 
Jean-Jacques was also, in his way, the philosophical progenitor of Facebook, of the notion that we should live our lives in the open, hiding nothing, for concealment is both the symptom and the cause of insincerity, which was one of J-J’s bugbears. He begins his Confessions in a self-congratulatory way: “Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly after nature and in all her truth, that exists and probably ever will exist.”