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Published 15 June 2002 (word count: 750)
Atlas
isn’t shrugging, he’s moving to Bermuda.
By
opening PO box style corporate headquarters on Caribbean isles, American
corporations can (gasp!) keep more of their profits.
Tyco International, for example, protected $400 million from the
professional tax-grabbers. As
you might expect, this PO box maneuver has PO’d the professional
tax-grabbers.
Republicans
and Democrats have bleated almost comically stereotypical reactions.
Republicans naturally see these offshore operations as a moral
issue. Democrats
predictably frame them in terms of class warfare. Otherwise, both agree that the already morbidly obese federal
government just can’t tolerate a single tax morsel escaping its
treasury belly.
“These
expatriations aren’t illegal, but they’re sure immoral,” harrumphs
Iowa’s Republican Senator Charles Grassley.
“During a war on terrorism, coming out of a recession, everyone
ought to be pulling together.” (i.e.,
“you pulling out your wallets and we pulling out your money.”)
You can almost hear him paraphrasing the Bush-Cheney-Powell-Rumsfeld
barbershop quartet, “If you move to Bermuda the terrorists will have
won!”
Never
mind that they’re moving (aka voting with their feet) to escape
homegrown professional tax terrorists like Grassley.
And
Democrats (here’s that familiar class warfare thing) are shocked,
shocked, to discover that some executives might personally benefit from
a Bermuda relocation. How
dare these American citizens benefit from their own efforts when
everyone knows that it’s the professional tax-grabbers who are
supposed to benefit from the efforts of American citizens.
Many
in congress are demanding laws to keep the tax slaves from escaping. Congressional Republicans are proposing a “temporary
moratorium” on relocations. (A
modern incarnation of the antebellum Fugitive Slave Laws?)
Even after proposals like this, many libertarians still have
Republican friends who actually believe the fairy tale that the Grand
Old Party stands for smaller government and the free market.
Treasury
Secretary Paul O’Neill looks askance at this stance.
“The overly complex US corporate tax code needs to be fixed.”
But libertarians are cautioned to ask, “Fixed how?”
Fixed to squeeze every possible penny from corporate profits?
Or fixed to allow companies and their investors to keep what
they’ve earned, thereby returning Bermuda to vacationing status rather
than a sanctuary for tax victims?
Arianna
Huffington has a word for people who relocate in the name of legal tax
avoidance: “Sleazy.” (Full
disclosure: years ago I moved from high-state-income-tax Minnesota to
no-state-income-tax Texas. That
makes me a sleazeball. Or
is that slimebag?)
Although
this is my first direct exposure to an Arianna Huffington column, she
wastes no time in introducing me to her vision of a world wherein every
Roosevelt dime earned by any American anywhere any time rightfully
belongs to government, to be doled out to whomever they, or she, thinks
should get it.
But
Ms Arianna sees an even darker horror.
Not only do these companies escape taxes, they escape (gasp!)
dictatorial political control. These
“sleazy” corporations are “immune to judgments against them in US
courts, less accountable to their shareholders, who are unable to file
class action suits, and freed from a whole host of annoying government
regulations.”
But
she seems not to have a similar concern for the fatted pig that is
government. If she had even
the slimmest concept of freedom, she might have written something like
this: “These sleazy tax-grabbing politicians are immune to
judgments against them in US courts, virtually unaccountable to their
constituents, who are unable to file class action suits when they’re
lied to, and freed from a whole host of annoying Constitutional
regulations.”
Huffington
is equally quixotic when addressing corporate-government relationships.
Expatriate companies that use the Caribbean “sleazy
tax-cheating loophole” will also “think nothing of holding out their
hand when Uncle Sam is shelling out government contracts.”
But who passed the “sleazy tax-cheating loophole” into law?
Whose money is being shelled out in those contracts?
Why doesn’t Huffington huff against “sleazy tax-grabbing
Uncle Sam” who has utterly no justification in a free society to
coercively redistribute other people’s money to anyone else, sleazy
corporations or otherwise?
Libertarians
have a solution to all of this that’s so breathtakingly simple it
almost hurts: demand that our politicians obey the Constitution.
By abolishing the ninety to ninety-five percent of government
that isn’t authorized by the Constitution we’d all have money to
invest in options that might actually solve some of society’s problems
through honest, voluntary interactions.
Immigrants have been coming to America for centuries to escape the tyranny of their homelands. It's sad to see Americans fleeing America, if only in a fiscally technical sense, for much the same reasons. - by Garry Reed
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