We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Matthew Lynn, a columnist for Bloomberg, has a good and succinct take on the latest nonsense about actions by the German and British government to use information – obtained in highly dubious circumstances – to go after people who have put their money away in tiny European tax havens such as Liechstenstein. Philip Chaston of this blog has already touched on the subject. The difficulty that even any pro-freemarketeer politicians – if there are many – have in defending tax havens is defending the right of people to essentially flee from an oppressive but still-democratic regime. In chatting to people on this issue and reading the commentary, a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters. In other words, non-domiciled residents who want to get away from the British taxman are not being good, democratic citizens by shirking their ‘responsibilities’.
At its core, what this issue throws up, beyond the practical issues of how tax rates hurt economies, is a broader issue of the obligations, if any, that an individual has to his fellow citizens. If one believes the classical liberal idea that governments exist to serve the individual and not the other way round, that individuals have no apriori obligations to others, then the crackdown on tax-avoiders should be seen as the power grab that it is.
Another issue, of course, is this: democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may – may – be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence. Tax havens rile communitarians precisely because they are a standing reproach to the looters who use democratic mandates to justify their depredations. They act as a brake on the power of governments with a temporary majority in a democratic assembly every bit as powerful as other checks and balances such as independent courts and upper chambers. And as traditional checks and balances are eroded – as they have been in Britain recently – we need all the constraints on national and supranational power we can get. We should therefore see the efforts by EU and other nations to create a global tax cartel as being every bit as dangerous as the alleged cartel deals forged by the 19th Century “robber barons”, except of course that this latter group were usually unfairly maligned. Compared to the tax-cartel zealots, Rockefeller and Co. were strict amateurs.
We know that the European Union does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. We know that governments will accept stolen goods if they think that they can get away with it. The British government is now capitalising on the proceeds of theft, a manoevre that would result in individuals going to jail. Let us hope that this is challenged, since how could one guarantee the veracity of stolen data:
Meanwhile, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) expects to obtain £100m in unpaid tax from 100 Britons who bank in Liechtenstein. It paid £100,000 to Heinrich Kieber, a former bank employee, for clients’ names and bank account details. In the past few days it has begun sending them letters referring to their account numbers.
The European Commission, Britain and Germany are attacking any country that wishes to provide a tax haven. Along with the OECD and its list of recalcitrant countries, they wish to overturn secrecy laws and end the existence of tax havens. If you cannot stand the heat of tax competition, they reason that you should crush the territories:
THE chancellor is to step up hostilities against Britain’s super-rich by pressing for sanctions against Monaco, the Mediterranean tax haven.
Under one proposal, to be discussed by Alistair Darling with European finance ministers on Tuesday, there will be a levy on any money transferred to a Monaco account from anywhere in Europe. Precise policies will be discussed the following week at a meeting of Europe’s tax authorities in Berlin.
The threat of sanctions marks an escalation in the battle between European governments and the continent’s three remaining tax havens: Liechtenstein, Andorra and Monaco.
“So far the attention has been on Liechtenstein, but Monaco is the goldmine,” said a Whitehall official. “Germany has got the bit between its teeth now and Monaco is where they want to go next – and we’re right with them.”
They even have Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore in their sights. I foresee an archer’s salute and a raspberry. Note that the usual excuses of terrorism, moneylaundering and social justice will be trotted out as an attack upon the freedom of individuals to live where they please and enjoy the pleasures of low taxation. Remove the threat and the peons at home might not want the same.
I just do not understand it. When Spain capitulated to attacks from Islamic fascists and elected a socialist government who promptly pulled its troops out of coalition operations… a policy we have been told by many that the USA and UK should follow in order to stop provoking the Islamists… that should have been the end of Spain’s non-Basque terrorist problems. Presumably the nice people from the Al Qaeda Global Franchise were utterly delighted by the developments in Spain and were certain to fulsomely reward this behaviour. After all, we are often assured by writers in both the mainstream media and paleo-conservative/paleo-libertarian circles that this is what governments in the West must do if we are ever to sooth Islamic sensibilities: we leave them alone and they will leave us alone, right?
Yet strangely, far from redirecting their efforts and assets to ply their ‘trade’ against the more active members of the coalition, Islamic militants continue to get arrested in ever so repentant Spain.
Gosh, one might almost think that leaving them alone is not enough! Surely some misunderstanding?
In Germany recently, there was a pleasing moment of defiance in the face of the determination of the banning classes to ban smoking. Boss fires staff for not smoking is what the headline says, and this is – surprise surprise – inaccurate, assuming that the report under the headline is accurate. The boss fired the non-smokers because they were making a damn nuisance of themselves by demanding that the smokers stop smoking, and he has now announced that he will not hire any more non-smokers, in case they behave similarly. Nobody got fired merely for not smoking. Not that there would be anything wrong with that.
But this is only a very small and temporary victory for the right of employers to hire and fire at will, restrained only by whatever contracts may have been made that require otherwise.
Germany introduced non-smoking rules in pubs and restaurants on January 1, but Germans working in small offices are still allowed to smoke.
It is the little word “still” that tells the true story here. And big offices have already been sorted out. This tiresome little anomaly will soon be corrected, and Germany will proceed methodically towards making smoking illegal everywhere. Adolf Hitler (not even he was able to give legal force to his detestation of smoking) is smirking in his grave, doing no turning whatsoever.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who currently covers economic issues for the Daily Telegraph, wonders whether the €uro zone, faced with a possibly ruinously high exchange rate for the single currency against the dollar and some other major currencies, will embrace the “nuclear option” of imposing exchange controls to prevent the euro rising much further. Evans-Pritchard wonders whether such thoughts are idle. I think he is right but is also right to ponder this issue. If, in order to protect the likes of Airbus and other big exporters, the EU were to halt or control inflows of capital to the euro zone, the impact on places like London, the world’s largest forex market, would be devastating. Tens of thousands of jobs in the money market business would be lost. Such controls would further hammer any idea that the EU had, or ever has had, much to do with free trade. It would set back the cause of global free markets for years. Some defenders for exchange controls might try to argue that they would be less bad than higher tariffs on imports to the EU, but there are plenty of those tariffs already.
The general popularity of the euro at the moment is more because it is – temporarily – seen as a more reliable store of value than the dollar, rather than because of a new-found belief in in the economic prowess of Germany, France, Italy or Spain, for instance. With a large budget and current account deficit, the US has been letting the buck drop to make its exports more competitive overseas and as a result, the euro and the pound have risen, making it cheap for Brits to take their holidays in the States, for example. There is some sign that this exchange rate movement is working (I am actually pretty bullish about American exporters for the next year. I am actually quite upbeat about the US economy, which is always written off, with a hint of anti-American bias, by the usual commentators).
I do not think the EU will embrace exchange controls; such a move would be hugely controversial and unlikely to succeed. Prophets of doom would do well to recall that West Germany, back in the 1970s, lived quite successfully with a strong deutschemark; there is nothing axiomatic about why the EU cannot cope with a strong euro, at least not in the short run. The more fundamental problem, of course, is whether the countries making up the euro zone should have joined it in the first place, given their different characteristics. I think the euro could be a disaster for some nations, or at least a very painful experience. My wife’s country, Malta, is about to join the euro next year. Thank god it does not have a big export market.
One of the best debunkers of lazy, collectivist economic thinking is the blogger Tim Worstall, who lives in the sunny climes of Portugal. His take-down of Polly Toynbee is just too good to miss. I particularly cannot help noticing the point about Sweden; the country, often held up as a model of social democratic goodness, is in fact moving in liberal directions in areas like education (vouchers), although it remains shockingly heavily taxed.
One hundred and three days after their general election, life goes on in Belgium. People go to work, they meet their friends, the beer is world class, the food is good, folks go about life as they always have. And there is still no government.
Hopefully the country will provide an inspirational example to the rest of the EU and split under the pressure caused by increasing Flemish unwillingness to pay the parasitic leftists who dominate Wallonia. Of course things might get messy but more likely it will be a velvet divorce… but the really interesting thing for me is that society and the economy continues to function just fine without any active government at all. No new laws, no cabinet meetings, and yet somehow the sky has not caved in and the world keeps turning.
There is an interesting article about the current political crisis in Belgium on Libertarian.be. Yes, yes, I know, when is Belgium not having a political crisis? But if this article is correct, this might be The Big One… and it could be the single currency, the €uro, that made it all possible.
Brussels Journal had a recent article on Vlaams Blok and contended that the political party did not receive playing field treatment. Such news no longer surprises and one can count down the days when a constrained political environment enters the UK, as politics is domesticated.
Next Sunday, the Belgians go to the polls. For various reasons the elections can hardly be called fair and democratic. Today the leadership of Vlaams Belang, Belgium’s largest party which strives for the independence of Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking northern half, met a delegation of OSCE observers to complain about various violations of the rules as outlined in the OSCE’s 2005 “Election Observation Handbook” (referred to below as EOH).
VB Senator Jurgen Ceder listed ten serious violations:
- Electronic voting without certification procedures
- Discrimination in campaign financing
- Candidates and political parties do not have access to the media on a non-discriminatory basis
- The state media are clearly biased
- Paid political advertising in daily newspapers is available to all parties, except one
- One political party cannot hold meetings in the capital
- Intimidation of candidates
- One party has been banned. Next step will be exclusion of certain candidates from the right to participate in elections
- The number of representatives is not proportional to the size of the electorate
- The elections in the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency are unconstitutional
Who would be their first target in the UK: UKIP? BNP?
One of the downsides of being stuck in a hotel is having ones breakfast browsing depend overly on the dismal International Herald Tribune, the incestuous off-spring of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
There was an article in the IHT about the Italian state cracking down on tax evasion which cause the customary eye rolling when a free marketeer reads statements of of unquestioned absurdity such as:
If tax evasion is Italy’s national sport, as many people say, then the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi has been working to change the rules of the game since taking office last year. Prodi says he believes that cracking down on tax cheaters is essential for an upswing in Italy’s lackluster economy. This month, he warned that his government could not lower taxes until “the indecent level of tax evasion” was reduced.
So taking more money away from people, essentially destroying some of their wealth, will make the economy better? And the government will not reduce the amount of personal wealth it destroys until people start cooperating more with having their wealth destroyed?
Yes, that all makes perfect sense.
On Saturday, I took this photograph of the Torre de la Vala. This tower is part of the ramparts of the Alcazaba, the (largely destroyed) citadel of the Alhambra, the palace and fortress of the former Moorish kings of Granada in Spain. At this exact place, the banners of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were flown on January 2, 1492, upon the surrender of King Muhammad XII of Granada (known to the Spanish as Boabdil). This marked the capture of Granada and the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain.
It all seems rather violent and provocative to me though. If perhaps the reconquistadors had negotiated and found a peaceful settlement rather than forcibly erecting their banners, then the so called “Tragedy of Andalucia” might not have occurred, and the world might be a better place with fewer grievances today. Rather than releasing occasional rants to Al-Jazeera from a cave somewhere near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, Osama bin Laden might be a well adjusted and peaceful man running a flat pack furniture business from an office park in Abu Dhabi, and the World Trade Center in New York City might yet be standing.
Or perhaps not.
The EU is going to ban ordinary lightbulbs because we are making the wrong choices and not buying the energy efficient ones. And who’s to blame for poor sales of the more efficient ones? The EU.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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