The certified political liberal Garrison Keelor, who chats weekly about "Lake Woebegon" on his PBS radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, often comments about the dark and inverted nature of Norwegians he knows in his home state of Minnesota.
But now the United Kingdom-based Observer reports that Norway's socialist government is leading a new campaign against tax havens and low-tax jurisdictions of all kinds. The basis for this unreasonable attack include totally false premises, such as the wild claim that poorer nations are being robbed of tax revenues because of the free movement of capital offshore. The fictional number of US$1 trillion supposedly is the annual figure lost to offshore tax evasion, according to these latest anti-tax haven warriors of the Left. This illicit campaign completely ignores the many benefits of global tax competition, including better tax policy, lower taxes and the protection of human rights, including the right to own and enjoy private property.
The Norwegian socialists claim London is a hub of offshore tax evasion led in large part by bankers, accountants and lawyers there. The Norwegian government says it wants to form a global coalition to "facilitate the recovery of assets illicitly stacked away in tax havens". Several left leaning countries are set to join, but Britain, recently classed as an "offshore financial center" by the International Monetary Fund, is not among them.
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Meanwhile the World Bank, now headed by Robert Zoellick, is under pressure to establish its first study into what some leftists claim is the illicit cash flowing out of developing nations said to amount to ten times the US$100 billion spent on foreign aid and debt write-offs by rich countries that is siphoned out of developing and emerging countries. Honing in on their targets, the Left claims that corporations are responsible for 60 per cent of that figure through a web of trusts, nominee accounts and the mispricing of goods to escape tax. Cracking down on tax havens and the evasion of taxes by some of the world's biggest companies is seen as the "missing link" in the poverty alleviation agenda. Investigators and lawyers at a conference on the "Movement of Illicit Funds" in Washington last week claimed it was corporations and not corrupt politicians in the developing world that accounted for most tax evasion.
The Norwegian anti-tax haven plan is just the latest version of the many demagogic attacks and phony blacklists aimed at tax havens that have stemmed from leftist groups such as the Organization for Economic and Community Development (OECD), the UN and the EU, all of them lovers of high taxes and limited economic freedom.
Maybe all this nonsense is just another manifestation of that dark, foreboding nature of Norwegians of which Keelor often speaks. But that's no excuse for foisting their economic doom, gloom and stupidity on the rest of the world.
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