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Last week the Slovak Republic passed a tax reform law introducing a flat tax rate at 19 percent for income and value added tax (VAT) with effect from January 2004. The Finance Ministrer, Ivan Miklos, hopes that such a vast reform will spur further economic growth and attract more investments.
Tax reform, and tax rates at the lowest possible level for everyone is an important motivation to attract investors. It is a strong and positive signal for the inflow of foreign investments.
Flat tax, the abolishment of taxation on dividends, and profit shares that are included in the tax reform is the correct way of supporting those who want to invest. This is a fair, horizontal aid from the state that sets the same conditions for everyone.
It seems that the Slovaks have done their homework and the Finance Ministry proposes the reform arguing that the flat tax or a tax similar to this one has been introduced in 33 countries, GDP growth in these countries is two times higher than in others and quoting examples of effective unified tax in New Zealand, Estonia and Hong Kong.
Apart from changes in income taxes and VAT, the reform will abolish gift tax and inheritance tax by the end of 2003 and introduce a flat 3-percent real estate transfer tax in 2004 with a chance to abolish it later on. In my book these qualify as glimpses of common sense, as exhibited in the statement of Peter Papanek, the spokesman for the finance minister:
Those taxes represented multiple taxation of property that was already taxed once.
An article in the Slovak Spectator explains that for corporations this means a lower income tax compared to the current rate of 25 percent. Individuals, nowadays taxed progressively within the range of 10 – 38 percent (the percentage increases with higher incomes), will all pay the same tax rate. Two current rates of VAT, a reduced one at 14 percent and a standard one at 20 percent, will be unified from the beginning of next year at 19 percent.
This is all interesting and very good news for Slovakia indeed. Now if they only got their social security payments and national health contributions in order… Nevertheless, the country is certainly moving in the right direction and it is probably worth keeping on one’s radar.
via Teekay’s Coffeeshop
And Slovak babes are not bad either
Tomas at Teekay’s Coffeeshop has an excellent post on how the Czech police decided to go after the oldest profession and benefit from register all hookers in a special database. The software for this essential exercise was provided by the UN.
After raiding 475 nightclubs past weekend in a well-meant effort to combat organized slavery, the Secretary of Interior Mr Gross (nomen omen) came up with this idea that prostitutes are to be monitored. The official goal is to find out about the movement of prostitutes within the EU.
Police will enter the data about anyone who looks like a hooker, after checking and recording data on your citizen ID card (it’s mandatory to bear it at all times). Main source of data will be nightclubs and bars of certain sorts, but the police isn’t limited to these venues only.
Central European babes are not known for their coy dress sense
Apparently, it is enough for a girl to wear something ‘crazy’ for her to end up in the National Hooker Registry. And there is no recourse, just as there are no rules, no checks, no appeal. Tomas concludes:
The next step will be regulated legalization: with all of them registered and monitored, the State will make a liberal gesture and allow some prostitution. Carefully controlled, with price limits, annual re-registration, you name it. Of course, it will also be much easier to monitor the customers of such services, and that could come in handy, too, right?
I think he may be on to something there…
Whilst sitting in a café surrounded by all of Bratislava’s Central European splendours and pondering how to get my treasures back to London…
…I could not but notice how all that history has interesting effects on the local arts…
Of course there are many local inspirations, not just the historical ones…
We decided to just try and take my new prized possession, my dragon, on the aeroplane with us. The artist obligingly packed it up in a most expert manner and we just took it with us as luggage, praying that it did not get crushed on the bus to Vienna or smashed into matchsticks by the baggage handlers…
…Arriving back in London  , we took a cab home and were welcomed by a very liberty-friendly message en-route…
Finally back home, we unpacked the new love of my life and is was… perfect!
Nice to be back but I shall certainly visit Bratislava again … for the artworks of course 
Continuing my tales of Bratislava…
One of the things I very much enjoyed was the food. Although a short visit of only a few days does not give my views much authority, I have to say that both the home cooked meals and restaurant victuals were really rather good. One restaurant in particular was so good that I would have to say it would make my top ten must-eat-at places anywhere I have been… and all modesty aside I am extremely well travelled. This splendid place is called Café Zichy (formerly known by the name ‘Harmonia’). The venison in plum sauce with puréed chestnut was sublime. I was also introduced to the splendours of Demänovka, the excellent local firewater. The service at the Zichy was informative and agreeable without being intrusive: the place is a mandatory visit when in Bratislava!
Another thing that caught my eye…
…is that if you pay attention, you can find interesting and idiosyncratic art all over the place. Some of it very modern and some of it very old indeed…
But as I have mentioned before, Bratislava is filled with the sort of distractions that can make a person miss such details…
During my meandering around the cobbled streets, I encountered the first dragon I saw in Bratislava: a rather fine golden dragon which happens to be the mark of a pharmacy…
…and although I did not know it yet, it was the first indication I was about to fall madly in love, but more about that later
Whenever I visit a new city, I always pay attention to the graffiti and political posters as I always believe it is worth seeing what ‘the others’ are saying. When I was passing though Vienna airport a few days earlier the only graffiti I saw was ‘EU NEIN’ engraved on the flusher in the men’s room…
Compared to Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the other part of the Slavic world in which I have considerable experience), Bratislava has much less of a problem with graffiti or flyposting. It was mildy interesting therefore that in Slovakia the only political posters I saw were for a rather incoherent group of ‘anarchists’ and a nameless call (in English) to ‘smash the reds’…
Warning sign number one… these ‘anarchists’ are waving their flags on May Day.
There may have been other political posters but the distractions on the streets of Bratislava are many and varied…
I saw an interesting sign of the transformations going on in Slovakia when I visited a carpet warehouse with my hostess, the mother of my travelling companion. The warehouse was until quite recently the Factory of MDZ (Medzinarodny Den Zien, or International Women’s Day)… an old style communist industrial collective. I was much amused to see that under its new capitalist management, it was advertising Astroturf, a quintessentially American product.
During our meanderings, we wandered past a rather typical gated Austro-Hungarian era courtyard and noticed a small sign directing us to something called ‘Gallery F7’. Being curious by nature, we went in and found at the far end, an exhibition of the work of an artist called Jozef Borovka… and that is where I well and truly fell in love.
Borovka’s work was just fantastic. He is an extremely talented Slovak artist working in wood, stone, oil and pen and I would have happily walked off with almost every item that was on exhibit. As it happened, that day was the last day of the show and so we contacted the artist and arranged to purchase several of his works. The first we acquired was a superb and whimsical bison made of 5 kg (11 lbs) of stone with antlers made from a coat hook, the second was a pen and ink drawing of a rural house in the Slovak countryside, the third was a female torso in mahogany on a large brass base…
…and the last piece was a table… but, oh, what a table! This was the true object of my undying affections: the finest Dragon in Bratislava.
However seeing as we were flying on Air Berlin, which is El Cheapo No Frills Cattle Class Airlines personified, actually getting a honking great cherry wood, mahogany, glass and brass table that was very fragile back to London was rather a major problem. We explored shipping it back via DHL but that proved to be prohibitive on the grounds of price, so we retired to the many and wonderful cafés of Bratislava to ponder what to do and admire the passing parade…
More to follow…
Following some rather personally difficult times, I was recently whisked off to foreign parts by a friend who decided I very badly needed to get out of London for a while to get my head together. And so, a day after a funeral and one of the worst days of my life here in London, I found myself on an Air Berlin BAe-146 aeroplane heading, indirectly, for Bratislava, the capital city of the Slovak Republic.
Due to the hasty nature of the flying arrangements, my friend and I travelled via Mönchengladbach (that’s near Düsseldorf, in Germany). As it happens, that 30 minute stop-over allowed me to see something to delight any aviation enthusiast… an airworthy Junkers 52!
From Germany we headed to Vienna, where we were picked up by my traveling companion’s mother and thence a short drive across the Austrian border to Bratislava.
Although I was very keen on getting a break from my surroundings, given that my friend had never really described Bratislava fondly (having grown up under communism does have that effect), I must say I did not have very high expectations, given the grey and bleak preamble I had received (I suspect my colleague is in no danger of being offered a job by the Slovak Tourist Agency).
Blimey… I was really in for a surprise!
Although surrounded by the expected outer layer of ghastly public housing (but then are any major cities on the west not similarly blighted?), Bratislava’s inner city is simply gorgeous.
The inner city is almost entirely unspoiled by the pox of post war modern architecture, yet it far from being a moribund museum: it positively pulsates with life and exuberance. → Continue reading: A trip to Bratislava
On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme (on Monday’s show – if my memory serves) there was a story about the destruction of the forests of Eastern Europe.
The BBC journalist would refer to forests in country after country and talk about how the trees were “illegally cut down” and the timber “illegally imported into Western European countries”.
I noticed something about the BBC man’s remarks. In each Eastern European country he discussed he talked about the ‘national parks’ or the ‘national forests’ – never once did he talk about privately owned forests being destroyed.
Whether forests are owned by old aristocratic families or by private companies (as in the State of Maine) there is no question of them being destroyed for a quick buck – ownership (as opposed to licences, or ‘rights to’ or other nonsense), brings concern for the long term.
Of course the BBC man did not notice this – he just claimed that ‘things’ would be improved when the Eastern European nations joined the European Union and there were even more regulations than there are now.
Citizens of the Czech Republic, about to vote in the referendum on their country’s entry into the EU, were shocked to find in their inboxes yesterday an email from their Prime Minister. Is this e-politics? They do not think so and they certainly are not impressed. The Prime Minister spamming, er, addressing the nation.
A Czech blogger comments on AcidLog:
I don’t know who thought up the campaign, but I know that if a commercial product were marketed this way, the company would be doomed.
He also provides the text of the email. Judge for yourselves:
Dear citizens,
The moment of a serious decision is close, which should be made by each of us confidently and independently. It is a decision that is beyond the boundaries of the everyday political disputes and squabbling. We are deciding the future of our country for decades. Those who say that the decision we make this Friday and Saturday is a ‘draft’ one are wrong. This is not the case. The referendum is binding and the result will determine whether the Czech Republic enters the European Union or whether it will chose a long period of isolation. Every one of us has experienced a moment in his life when an opportunity was missed and it never came back.
Vladimir Spidla
Prime Minister
Although the blogger intents to vote yes, he lists a number of arguments used by the anti-EU campaigners: the EU’s murky financial management, scandals regarding selection of agencies (presumably refering to allocation of EU contracts), the idiotic pseudo-documentaries on TV insulting the viewers’ intelligence, the scandal with real EU citizens (perhaps some local affair), leaflets full of newspeak and arguments notable by their absence and concert by one of the divas of Czech pop.
Despite the obvious sarcasm, it seems that the level of anti-EU campaigning in the ‘New Europe’ is pitifully inadequate. They have a lot to overcome as the EU propaganda gives a powerful incentive to the average Czech citizen. Tomas Kohl explains:
People from UK or abroad know little about the quality and range of arguments presented here to convince the public to say Yes. Instead of focusing on heavy issues like economic and monetary policy, questions about sovereignty, foreign relations, the government plays the game of nonsense issues and tries to lure us with sweet promises of a better tomorrow.
Following are the main selling points of the ongoing pro-EU propaganda, paid by taxpayers:
The borders will disappear, people will be able to travel freely
We’ll be able to study in EU countries for free
We’ll be able to work anywhere in the EU
We’ll get a large chunk of money from Brussels
More security
Tomas’s appeal to the British is touching:
I just pray the Brits won’t accept that damn Constitution that is coming their way. Britain has been the most prominent power player holding Europhile madmen from doing the worst things for some time. If they lose, we can elect conservative party in 2006 and it won’t matter anymore. Guys, wake up!
Yeah, let’s wake up and do something… It might be a good idea to notice the countries that we know so little about and care even less. After all they did come out in support of the Anglosphere, incurring the wrath of Chirac in the process and jeopardizing the candies he was graciously considering handing out to them. The civil societies there are still very fragile and without a heavy-weight ally they stand no chance against the EU Federasts.
Another Czech blogger sums up his thoughts on the issue in a graphic succinctly named “Entry to the EU”.
Instapundit links to this UPI report:
WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) — As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully — and knowingly — false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.
“In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an ‘appropriate and serious review’ of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times,” Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.
Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the “confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty’s award,” Nynka wrote.
The utter falsehood of Duranty’s claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine – a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others – has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented – and potentially immensely embarrassing – procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.
The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the “Harvest of Sorrow” by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.
One of the lesser lies now circulating about the Cold War, Communism and all that is that because it is now history, we should all forget about it.
So, in an attempt to spread interest in this important issue by trivialising it, I have a question. Walter Duranty � Jimmy Duranty. What if any is the connection between these two persons?
Jimmy Duranty was the bloke who sang that song that they used at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, right? And in one of my all time favourite movies ever, What’s Up, Doc?, Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand sing a song called “You’re The Top” or some such thing, and during their version of this, reference is made to “The Great Duranty”. Walter, yes? Or is that Jimmy? If it’s Walter, it shows how the lie has reverberated down the decades, but is it?
It’s not that I’m opposed to writing serious prose about murderous famines and about the scumbags in the West who concoct and print lies about how these murderous famines aren’t murderous famines at all and then spend another seventy years lying about all their earlier lies – merely that joking around is one of the ways you draw attention to such things.
I’ll bet that the EUnuchs are beside themselves with glee now that they have managed to co-opt the Pope:
Just three weeks before the EU membership referendum in Poland, Pope John Paul II has recommended that his compatriots join the European Union.
Sure to be seen as a benediction by many in Poland. Does the Pontiff not realise that the EU is the work of the Devil?
Matthew Maly writes in with a remarkable tale of malfeasance and cover-up from stretching from the Ukraine & Russia to the corridors of power in the United States
Four years ago, I alerted the US Department of Defense about $20M grossly mismanaged and/or stolen from Defense Enterprise Fund (DEF), a US-financed program to convert the former Russian producers of weapons of mass destruction (anthrax, nuclear, etc). A Department of Defense Audit proved the theft, but the guilty American managers were not even reprimanded.
When Vector Plant of Novossibirsk, the Soviet Army’s prime facility for producing militarized anthrax and smallpox spores, asked for just $1M to convert itself – DEF did not have the money. When DEF COO was purchasing his private apartment in Moscow, DEF had a million dollars to finance it.
Just recently, I caused Defense Threat Reduction Agency to lower the number former Soviet WMD scientists said to be converted by DEF to peaceful pursuits from 3370 to 1250, a 66% reduction! But the real figure is no more than 200 scientists, not a good result for a $67M program.
A more complete description is here. For the full story, please go here and then click on “DEF”.
After my letter of concern, I was immediately blacklisted for US-financed assistance jobs in the NIS which was a professional and financial catastrophe for me. I am extremely frustrated that there has been four (!) intentionally inconclusive investigations of DEF, each refusing to look into my allegations. The Pentagon admits that the money is gone and that a $67M program is dead, victim of gross mismanagement, they do not disprove my letter, but they do not remove my name from the blacklist either.
Matthew Maly
As an anti-statist, free market capitalist libertarian, I am often ‘accused’ of being on the political right. Yet as so many libertarians will tell you, many of my ilk refuse to accept the statist left/right axis as having any relevance to us. One only has to listen to a pro-immigration libertarian such as myself and then listen to most Tories in the UK/Republicans in the USA to see an issue which shows the differences.
We often find that neo-conservatives agree with libertarian antipathy to Marxist and Keynesian state centred economics and the wealth & liberty destroying regulatory state. Yet to think that advocating laissez-faire makes us ‘right wing’ is to misunderstand just how large the cultural and philosophical gulf is between most true (i.e. capitalist) libertarians and most conservatives. Conservatives are about conserving, they are about continuity above all else… however libertarians are about liberty, conserving it where it can be found but also tearing down whatever impeeds it, regardless of whose sacred cows get gored in the process. We may wish to conserve what is objectively good but otherwise we are as Promethean as the Marxist left.
In the Daily Telegraph article Britain risks huge influx of east Europe migrants by Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, we see loaded language even in the title: ‘risk’. How about calling the article:
‘Britain opens doors to those formerly oppressed by Communism’
or maybe:
‘Britain steals a march on Continental Europe in grab for east European labour’
But no. The thrust of the article is that only the wonderful Tories want to ‘protect us’ from the Eastern Hordes.
Ministers said that allowing migrant workers from these countries into Britain at the earliest opportunity would help the economy. But Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, challenged the Government to explain why it had not made use of the transitional arrangements. “We live in a small and crowded island,” he said. “Why does the Government consider it appropriate not to have transitional controls when other EU countries have imposed them.”
Well it just so happens that the Telegraph article I am quoting from actually links to an article here on Samizdata.net from the Telegraph external links sidebar (cheers, guys!) called Why do people think that Britain is overcrowded? It really is not overcrowded and the idea we are somehow not going to be able to assimilate other Europeans is laughable. Oliver Letwin does not really care about providing the British economy with high initiative eastern European workers and entrepreneurs, he is just concerned with playing politics and attacking anything the dismal Blair government does, even when it is entirely correct.
Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something – anything – just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday’s Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:
Poland and the EU
From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson
Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.
Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.
Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.
Yours etc,
RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.
December 3.
It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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