A few years ago I watched a documentary, entitled The Gleaners, which followed Parisians who do precisely the same as "freegans," self-styled "freecyclers" who here in the U. S. utilize the internet to swap or swipe free stuff.
Anticipating the latter by several years, French gleaners puzzled me, because these “early adopters” live in arguably one of the most socialistic in the developed world. (I heard a story during the lead-up to the recent Sarkozy-Royale election that French celebrity Johnny Halliday actually lives in Switzerland as a tax fugitive to escape a progressive/punitive "wealth tax" that makes his total liability 60 percent. A tax Sarkozy pledged to roll back—to huge public outcry, as it turned out.) It seems odd to me that they intended their lifestyle choice as a reproach to the System, as if redistributionist France were still too bourgeois for their liking. Their critique seemed as dubious as that of their later American counterparts’; one suspects they were motivated solely by the impulse to freeload, and the whole political critique was simply window-dressing for what is really a will to laziness.
Welfare states require huge sums of revenue, after all—as well as an ideologically mobilized populace given incentive to work for something other than the potential to make huge sums of money (the one makes, the more the state takes). Gleaners/freegans seem to me more libertarian than leftist, because, by living off the fat of the urban land, they effectively avoid apportioned taxes, and, if adept enough at freecycling to escape work altogether, income tax as well. Theirs, then, is simply the same somethin’-for-nothin’ dodge that informs most Americans’ actions
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