[Tony474]

I'm not particularly an ardent royalist but by and large I'm in favour of our constitutional monarchy. Apart from the fact that the Duchy of Cornwall (Prince Charles's thing) puts back more into the public purse than it gets out of it, H.M. The Queen has also volunteered to pay tax on her personal income even though as monarch she is under no obligation to do so.

£40 million is a piddling, trifling sum in comparison with the bulk of U.K. tax revenue and I think it's a bargain when you consider the amount of tourism our royal institutions attract directly or indirectly; I'd bet that we get a lot of that, if not all of it, back from the spending of overseas visitors.

U.K. taxation is very high, having as it does to pay for (among other things) our social benefits system and the National Health Service, one of the world's biggest employers with a wage bill to match. This could be good or bad depending on which newspaper you read and believe. Even so, the V.A.T. rate of 17.5% is lower than in some other European countries and still only provides a modest proportion of tax revenue.

That's only the U.K., though, and not France or the rest of Europe. In fact, there the current strength of the Euro should help keep prices down. The real reason why U.S. instruments are so much more costly over here is the excessive mark-ups applied by the importers and retailers. To be fair, though, as Jim correctly points out, business overheads are higher here and need to be met. Competition from the Internet is helping to temper this to an extent but I can't see it ever being possible to buy an American guitar in Europe for anything like the same price as in the U.S.A.