Eight years later, Mitchell is on the warpath again. "Tax competition leads to low tax rates and increased prosperity," he told the Observer from his office in Washington. "Sovereign entities have the right to secure tax privileges. Even if the US government does not like it."
Well, he\’s right. That is what sovereignty means.
Insisting that other countries do it your way is, well, a bit colonial or imperialist, isn\’t it?
He’s absolutely right, of course, but as a politician he should know better than to talk sense. It’s the quickest way to get dismissed as an extremist or a nut.
The Guardian, Obama and a disturbing number of powerful people really do believe that all money belongs to them, and that if you manage to keep a bit you’re cheating them. It’s very hard to argue with people who are incapable of questioning their own arguments, or understanding yours.
Anyhow, nice one, Dan Mitchell.
(And also…) the only legitimate reason for taxing people in the first place is to be able to pay for things that the individual cannot provide for himself- defence, police, healthcare? poor relief? etc; the idea that tax rates must be set, not to cover the cost of these things, but to engineer some vision of social justice (and avoid competition between states) is the sort of demented socialism which has me reaching for the nearest lamppost. (Continued p.94, over at my place, so as not to abuse our host’s hospitality).
UnfortunatelyNOT engineering a social model results in the breakdown of society. Mitchell’s extreme views should rightly be held in contempt for protecting the wealth of the very few and for letting everyone else rot.
The make belief that entrepreneurs would suddenly spring up and provide jobs and affluence for all is as mythical as it comes. it simply does not work, if it did then why is the US in the doldrums? The lies put about by supply side economics and supporters of the failed Reagonomics are viscious in their intensity.
Supporting tax avoidance and evasion is morally bankrupt. Taxes are there to progress the whole of society. The issues of wastage are irrelevant if there are proper regulatory frameworks in place. The reason that there aren’t is due to the paucity of leadership and the willingness of leaders to reign in the rich multinats.
It’s all very well selling this idea that flat tax and loss of entightlements for the poor will succeed through the brute force of the ‘American Dream’ but in the meantime we have to watch our big accountancy firms, backed up by governments and other big biz, entice developing countries to ‘invest’ in products in secrecy jurisdictions, making them all wealthy except for the people in those countries.
What Mitchell proscribes is fundamentally abhorrent to humanity. We are not robots that live through mathematical models but social creatures that thrive on cooperation and trust. Advocating competition between countries into seeing who can attract the most tax avoidance business is perverse.
Tim adds: “We are not robots that live through mathematical models but social creatures that thrive on cooperation and trust.”
Indeed, and being threatened with jail if we do not pay the taxes that allow Mr. Timney to have a wank increases cooperation and trust does it?