September has been a mixed month so far for Professor James Tobin, who wouldn't be human if he didn't relish the publicity his eponymous tax has been giving him lately, but also knows (and says) that it is being put to the wrong use - ie to support the anti-globalisation movement, which may have noble motives but is economically illiterate. But worse is to come.
The United Nations wants to use the Tobin tax to enforce global taxation (this kind of globalisation of course is even worse than anti-globalisation) and thereby create a fund that will allow it to control the financing of third world development. The UN needless to say portrays its plans in high-flown moralistic language, but its critics detect a sinister conspiracy on the part of a group of unelected bureaucrats to build a world government.
Whatever the UN plan is, or isn't, it clearly does represent another fruit of the socialist hegemony of the mid-1990s, whose other poisoned produce includes the FATF, OECD and EU initiatives designed to suppress tax competition among the world's nations. The UN's plans, emerging later than the others, according to the rule that says 'the bigger the organisation the slower it moves', can be seen as building on the assumption of a level fiscal playing field. Once small nations have been deprived of the power to compete against their bigger brethren, it is easy to control them (and their votes in the General Assembly) by selectively dishing out aid and investment dollars. If you think this is fanciful then you need to read the recently-published report of the United Nations' "High-level Panel on Financing for Development".
The report of the Panel, chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico, has 12 major recommendations, every one of them scary, but the four that particularly concern taxation are the creation of an 'International Tax Organization', the imposition of global taxes (eg the Tobin tax), the creation of a fund from the proceeds of global taxation and a levy (ie, tax) of 0.7% of GDP on all developed nations, and the establishment of a 'Global Economic Security Council' = a world government in all but name. The GDP levy just on its own is reckoned to create a flow of $1.5 trillion dollars a year - the UN's bureaucrats could achieve quite a lot with that!
The UN is asking all governments to agree to the 12 recommendations at a conference that forms part of its scheduled plan for world domination, seductively entitled 'The International Conference on Financing for Development', scheduled to take place in Mexico next March 18 - 22.
The Panel, its report and the conference result from a Declaration subscribed to last year by the General Assembly (your nation, and mine,and all the others):
"We will ... make every effort to ensure the success of the High-level International and Intergovernmental Event on Financing for Development ..." said the Millennium Declaration. At the time, many people dismissed this Declaration as just more typical United Nations hot-air - in fact, as we now see, it amounts to a blank check for the United Nations to do whatever it takes to achieve global governance.
The proposed International Tax Organization would have the power to enforce systematic information-sharing on all member nations, and the information (you guessed) would be cleared through its own computers. Tremble, George Orwell!
The Economic Security Council is, if possible, even more frightening. The Report endorses the recommendation of another UN-inspired monster, the Commission on Global Governance (CGG) on this point. A CGG report, Our Global Neighborhood, devotes more than 40 of its 410 pages, to a detailed discussion of the new Economic Security Council (ESC). It recommends 23 members, selected on a rotating basis, none with veto power, and no permanent members, and prescribes the "consensus" process for decisions, rather than voting. The ESC would subsume the WTO, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF and 'all agencies and organizations that have any influence over the international economy'.
This stuff is either horrifying, or absurd, or both - but it is real. Whether or not you think that the Panel stands any chance of gaining such powers, or even a fraction of them - and with George Bush in the White House it seems unlikely - how many people will think that this enormously costly process is a good use of their country's subscription to the UN?
As with the OECD, the United Nations is a necessary organisation, with good goals, which has been led astray by the Utopian but ultimately harmful aspirations of misguided left-wing politicians.
Now here is the $1.5 trillion question: will the anti-globalisation protesters like or dislike the Mexico conference?
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