In City Journal, Dalrymple recounts the Kafkaesque ordeal of Benjamin Brière, a young Frenchman imprisoned for three years in Iran on espionage charges, who returned home only to find himself erased from the French social security system and treated by the tax authorities as a delinquent.
Situations such as Brière’s now have a proposed remedy: a special tax regime for people kept hostage in foreign countries. Every bureaucratic problem has, naturally, a bureaucratic solution—requiring a special department to decide when it should be applied. Another problem solved!