Cyprus was just a stepping stone on a far bigger and more disturbing journey.
Over on EU Referendum, Richard draws attention to another – an ‘investigation’ into offshore tax havens that is leading the headlines in certain publications. As he explains:
For the last few days in certain newspapers, the dominant story has been a collaborative affair, running under the general title of “Secrecy For Sale: Inside The Global Offshore Money Maze“.
Styled as “one of the largest and most complex cross border investigative projects in journalism history”, it is co-ordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), working with more than 86 journalists in 46 countries in “an attempt to strip away the biggest mystery associated with tax havens: the owners of anonymous companies”.
He questions the motivation of those involved in this inquiry, and with very good reason. For the ICIJ is an organisation with an unsavoury history – as this blog discussed last year – which is working to a particular ‘big state’ agenda. For while the investigation ostensibly seeks to shine a light on the business of ‘dirty money’ and shady nominee companies, something it would be hard for anyone to take exception to, its real motivation is demonise tax havens and close down legal avenues for people to shield their wealth from taxation and confiscation by the wasteful, unrepresentative and self serving political class.
These are people for whom the concept of paying a ‘fair share’ is to say ‘you have money so we are taking it’. It is a spiteful and devisive approach that feeds on the envy and resentment of people who are not as well off.
Whenever tax havens are discussed they are deliberately associated with ‘dirty money’, quasi criminality and tax evasion. Yet as the paucity of identified wrongdoing demonstrates that it is mainly hard working, law abiding and successful people who use tax havens to legally avoid and minimise tax liability, and who are having their privacy assaulted as part of this effort to demonise the offshoring of assets. Note with care the fact that the offshore arrangements of the paymasters of these ICIJ stooges, such as the owners of the Guardian, are strictly off limits. Orwell’s pigs are taking control.
With its Marxist roots the ICIJ despises the concept of individuals taking steps to prevent government simply helping itself to the rewards other people have earned for hard work, entrepreneurship and personal risk. This is why the ICIJ is devoting so much energy and resource to this campaign and in the absence of widespread wrongdoing is content to muddy the waters and talks of perfectly legal tax avoidance as if it is something criminal and shameful. The sole aim is to close tax havens, further the goal of harmonising taxation policy around the globe, and enabling governments to attain the unfettered power to take from citizens, at will, anything they want when they want. This is the global governance agenda writ large and occasioned by the continuing erosion of liberty, private ownership and personal freedom.
The only shame in all this is that so many people have been brainwashed by a succession of parasitical governments into believing the confiscation of wealth is a socially responsible activity – despite the fact taxpayers have no say in how the revenues seized from them are used and abused by the political class to buy votes at election time with bribes to net consumers, funded with money taken from net producers and irresponsibly borrowed by the billion without realistic means of repayment.
Instead of cheering this nefarious campaign, people should be opening their eyes and understanding this represents the dismantling of what stands between limited government, barely held at bay by the people, and total domination of the citizenry by the real criminals – the undemocratic, unaccountable and unelected elite and their minions in the political class.
Organised crime is the excuse being offered up to justify this campaign. But it’s not about criminality, it’s about removing the last barriers to total domination of people by unaccountable governments and the vested interests that direct them from behind the scenes – individuals who will benefit from state sanctioned theft by the real organised criminals who are destroying the economies of the world and with them undermining the wealth and prospects of ordinary people.
AM,
I have to say I have no way of determining whether your take on this is good or not.
However, from what I DO know, it is the best explanation for these activities, and until and unless I’m convinced to the contrary that’s the theory I’m going with. So in practice as far as I’m concerned you’re right. It fits. Perfectly.
Good piece.
Spot on
Beautifully put, AM.
Insofar as I keep my meagre savings in an ISA instead of a cheque account, I could be said to be indulging in a spot of tax avoidance myself.
This makes sense as most Western Countries’ high tax regimes are the wrong side of the Laffer curve. Any further increases reduce the revenue they steal from us.
The next assault is on savings and assets as the people of Cyprus have found out and if the next UK Government is a LibLab coalition then people with large houses will, with a Mansion Tax.
But this is only a start, when the UK runs out of people willing to buy Gilts around 2017, then the wholesale theft of property, saving and valuable possessions will begin, wherever they are located in the world if you are a UK taxpayer. It is the only way the political elite will keep the plates spinning for a bit longer and their snouts deeply in the trough.
The banking crisis in the EU will also mean the wholesale theft of peoples’ savings to save the Banks in Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Austria and France. the principal has been established in Cyprus, but they need to know where the money is in tax havens and who it belongs to, so they can legally steal this to.