TAXLESS VILLAGES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 November 1938, Page 6

TAXLESS VILLAGES

HAPPY POSITION IN FRENCH AREA. DIVIDENDS PAID INSTEAD. It sounds like a fairy tale, and yet it is a fact confirmed by official documents, that twenty-four French communes in the Jura Mountains, with a total population of about 10,000, pay no local taxes, writes Bernhard Ragner from Besancon, France, to the “New York Times.” Instead, each inhabitant receives a yearly dividend ranging from 100 to 200 francs.

Further, there are eighteen other communes—with a population of 8000 —where no dividends are paid but where local taxes are non-existent.

This taxless paradise is visited year; ly by hundreds of tourists, both French and foreign. La Chaux des Crotenay, an attractive mountain resort, may be taken as an example. During the present century nobody has paid any local taxes in this Jura village. Instead, each inhabitant, including women and children, has collected a yearly dividend averaging 150 francs a year. Further, each family is furnished with free firewood; since the allowance is generous, half of it is usually sold and is also a dividend. If any citizen of the commune desires to build a house he is given a free plot of ground, also free stone and free sand. Finally, the village doctor is subsidised by the commune and, according to contract, he has reduced his fees; where other doctors charge twenty to twenty-five francs for a visit, he charges five to ten.

There are twenty-three other Jura villages or towns where the treasurer writes dividend cheques every year; among the names might be mentioned Grande-Riviere, Etival, Les Rousses. Bonlieu, St. Germainen-Montague, and Nozcroy.

The explanation is quite simple. In years gone by these communes became the propertors of spruce and fir woods in the vicinity;. there is even an Association of Forest-owning Villages. These woods are exploited in businesslike fashion by each commune, so well that there is a profit after ail communal expenses have been paid. Once a year the local authorities look over the accounts figure the annual profit, and then dechire a dividend.

Many square miles of Jura forest land are owned in this manner, and the villages have gone into the woodcutting and wood-selling trade. It should be explained that indirect taxes, also national taxes, both imposed by the central Government in Paris, are paid in these villages just as anywhere else. Their distinction is ■that they have abolished local taxes.