United Nations Suggests All Citizens Should Become Slaves

by Jeremy Hetherington-Gore, Tax-News.com, London

06 August 2001

Ripples continue to spread from the conspiracy agreed on between the great and good of the world's top nations in 1998/99 under which multilateral institutions agreed to try to suffocate the offshore jurisdictions which were successfully poaching their members' richest citizens and companies.

One of the natural laws of the multilateral jungle, OK, rainforest, is that the more bureaucratic the organisation, the longer it takes to act. So we had the EU, with a mere sixteen member states, coming out first with the Primarolo Committee, then the OECD and the FATF (the same thing) with twenty-eight member states following up with their blacklists in 2000, and only now does the leviathan United Nations with its zillions of member states break wind with a set of anti-competitive tax proposals. Didn't anyone tell it that the battle is already lost?

In June, the United Nations (UN) finally issued its report attacking tax competition and fiscal sovereignty. Chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico, the "High-level Panel on Financing for Development", which includes to his everlasting shame Russian reformer Alexander Livshits (perhaps they didn't translate into Russian?) endorsed the creation of an international tax organization, recommended the imposition of global taxes, and called for a form of tax harmonization known as information exchange. All governments would be expected to acquiesce to this scheme, which will be part of the agenda at the International Conference on Financing for Development, scheduled to take place in Mexico next March. Every one of these initiatives, says Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation, would undermine individual liberty and encourage statist economic policy. Like the OECD and the EU, the UN seeks to prop up inefficient welfare states by making it difficult for taxpayers to escape oppressive tax systems.

Mr Mitchell continues: "The UN report endorses the creation of an International Tax Organization. This new body would have some relatively mundane responsibilities, such as collecting statistics and monitoring developments in tax policy, but facilitating bad tax policy seems to be the number one objective. The Zedillo report explicitly states that the International Tax Organization should help countries tax income earned outside their borders, and it also argues that such a body could "take a lead role in restraining tax competition."

"At no point, however, does the report demonstrate any harm caused by fiscal rivalry between nations. Instead, readers are supposed to blindly accept the assertion that this competitive process is bad."

As Daniel Mitchell asks, if competition is good for banks, pet stores, and car companies, then how can it be bad for governments?

The section of the report devoted to 'global taxes' drags out tired old ideas like the Tobin Tax (a levy on currency transactions which is universally agreed by economists to be unenforceable and highly protectionist), and the 'carbon tax' which simply would result in higher prices, mostly for the very people who are most unable to avoid the use of carbon-based fuels.

With the bit firmly between their teeth, the report's (nameless) authors go on to advocate global taxes on seabed mining, ocean fishing, satellite launches, trade, air travel, and arms exports. Trade!!! Excuse me, please go back to first grade, all of you.

Perhaps the most radical proposal in the report, says Daniel Mitchell, is an initiative to give governments permanent taxing rights over their people. This "taxation of emigrants" is supposedly necessary to protect nations from economic loss when productive citizens emigrate. The report states that the enforcement of such a scheme could be one of the responsibilities of the new International Tax Organization.

Continues Mr Mitchell: "This idea implicitly assumes that people are a form of chattel, the property of a government even if they seek opportunity elsewhere. To be sure, there are jurisdictions that suffer from "brain drain." French citizens have been fleeing to England in record numbers and Canadians often make their way to the United States. In a world that values individual sovereignty and personal liberty, this would not be an issue. And even if some governments think emigration is a problem, perhaps they should put their own houses in order before seeking to make their citizens perpetual tax slaves. After all, France's brain drain is mostly a reflection of that country's oppressive tax system. England merely happens to be the unintended beneficiary of France's fiscal policy mistakes."

Mr Mitchell finishes with a well-directed broadside: "The good news is that the UN cannot move forward with its radical proposal without full support from the world's major governments. This means that the United States has effective veto power. To protect the interests of American taxpayers and to preserve prosperity and opportunity around the globe, Congress and the President should tell the bureaucrats at the U.N. to take a long walk off a short pier."

Daniel J. Mitchell is the McKenna Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Heritage Foundation.

David R Burton of the Prosperity Institute is equally scathing about the UN report in a piece entitled "The U.N. High Level Panel on Financing for Development Recommends Making Orwell’s Big Brother Real"

Commenting on the report's recommendation that financial information should be routinely exchanged between member states he says: "The proposed U.N. ITO would result in every U.N. member government having routine unqualified access to the financial information of the citizens of all U.N. member states. It would undoubtedly result in governments receiving this information using it not only for tax purposes but for intelligence purposes and to oppress minorities and political opposition."

As to 'emigrant taxation', Mr Burton says: "The idea that a government should be able to impose taxes on those that have emigrated from its jurisdiction is repugnant and a violation of fundamental human rights. It rests on the premise that the state retains a right to the fruits of its nationals' labor and investment income even after they have emigrated. It should be viewed as a violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 which states in relevant part that “[e]veryone has the right to leave any country.” "

The UN Report is online at http://www.un.org/esa/ffd/a55-1000.pdf

The members of the panel which produced this atrocious document and who should be banned from taking any further part in planning for mankind's future are as follows:

Abdulatif Al-Hammad, President, Arab Fund for Economic Development, Kuwait;
David Bryer, Director of OXFAM, United Kingdom;
Mary Chinery-Hesse, Former Deputy Director-General of the International Labour Organization, Ghana;
Jacques Delors, former Finance Minister of France and President of the European Commission;
Rebeca Grynspan, former Vice-President, Costa Rica;
Aleksander Livshitz, Chairman of the Board of the Russian Credit Bank;
Majid Osman, former Finance Minister of Mozambique, who now heads a commercial bank;
Robert Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury, United States;
Manmohan Singh, former Minister of Finance, India; and
Masayoshi Son, President and Chief Executive Officer of Softbank Corporation in Japan.

.

Recommended

Write a comment