General Discussion

Covid tests started out at €75, but quickly dropped in price. Tesults in 24 hours. Vaccinations were covered by the government—an atypically wise move, as it saved them billions in health care costs.

My French friends had a different experience with the French socialists, as they are not fine art dealers. They and/or their employers were terrorized by the squads sent out to extract fines from shop owners. Their pretexts for the fines were sometimes very creative. I know one shop whose books and taxes were so immaculate that they gave him a €1500 fine for having “software that was too slow.” When he went to pay it, the inspector rolled his eyes, apologized, and said it was not in his power to erase it, but he was able to reduce it by a third. Another shop a couple of hundred meters away had the owner arrested because it was taking too long to examine his books. He had a second residence in Belgium, so he was a flight risk. His staff, whom he always treated fairly, closed the shop and went on strike, sitting on the street in frint of it with signs not exactly full of praise for the socialist government. The media was starting to take notice, so they let him out in short order. During that era, I had to empty my pockets multiple times at the airport to prove I had no more than 2000 francs in cash—about $300–with me. The biggest critics of the French socialists were the French, themselves. No one suffered more under their rule than their own people, a theme I heard repeated in Pre-1989 Poland, East Berlin and Castro’s Cuba the one time I was allowed to go out on my own (as a government guest, I was accompanied by their officials for the rest of the time).