Courtesy of Mish.
I received an interesting email today from Andrea, who is from Italy but now lives in France.
The email is about "pigeons", a movement started by French entrepreneurs in protest of president Francois Hollande's tax policies. The "pigeon" movement has gone viral on Twitter.
Andrea writes …
Hello Mish
After the recently announced budget plan of Hollande-Ayrault governement with its huge round of tax increases, an on-line mouvement of start-up businessman has been very rapidly spreading out and going viral in France. This mouvement in just a few days has gone mainstream and become very popular: the government is even reconsidering some measures to cool down this protest.
The mouvement is called the "Pigeon".
The reason of the protest is very well explained by Pierre Chappaz (a "serial" start-up entrepreneur), and very well reported by Vincent Benard (an excellent libertarian economist and blogger) in his blog (in French) Objectif Liberté Esprit d'entreprise: "Hollande m'a tuer".
The point is: this wave of taxes will kill any economic motivation to create a company. The main sentence (quoted by Pierre Chappaz)
"I do not know a single startup founder who accept the idea that creating a company, in which it will invest all his savings and years of effort often without a salary, must then give to the State 60.5 % of gain when he sells his company if he succeeds. It should be known that 9 out of 10 startups fail, and in this case nobody will refund the founder. Then, on the 39.5% that he will be left with, it will pay 1 to 2% per year, every year for the ISF ("Wealth Tax"). And when he dies, the state will take 45% of what remains."
This is sad because France has been the cradle of some very nice companies in high-tech and Internet domains, many of them rapidly become leaders in France or even in Europe.
Best regards,
Andrea
Here is an English Translation of Objective Freedom: Entrepreneurship "Hollande Kill Me"…
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