ps. Dan, please always give the official’s name right up front – I believe such a policy is called “name and shame”? She certainly ought to be ashamed…

Few people grasp the truly anhillating multiplicative power of a high growth environment. The manual digger, can perhaps double his productivity by operating the shovel sixteen hours a day rather than eight. But the bulldozzer operator is the one that can multiply that by a factor of fifty times. And the buldozzer inventor is the one that can multiply it by a factor of fifty thousand. One bulldozzer inventor quitting the workforce — or simply taking early retirement, or a long sabbatical, or throttling down his career to a lesser rat race — could be equivalent to the productivity loss of tenths of thousands of manual diggers. It is these differences, of not simply percentages but entire orders of magnitude, that give capitalism its strength. What you see in America (or used to see) is the power of the bulldozzer inventor. That is the power that allows the Maxican immigrant gardenrer to have a trickle down standard of living five times the world average. But apparently the maxican gardener bamboozled by the suppliers of mandatory collectivism (politicians) has crossed the redistribution desire threshold and is now burning his American furniture to keep warm – he is lowering the competitiveness of American bulldozzer inventors below the competitiveness of bulldozzer inventors elsewhere in the world – he is in essence diging his own grave, together with his “occupy” friends – he will lower his standard of living to that of the AVERAGE world gardener (I’m an immigrant myself so please no lecturing on the political incorrectness of speaking in these terms – besides I’m using it as a perhaps innacurate stereotype to get my point across).

The bulldozzer inventors will gravitate towards those jurisdictions that allow them to keep the fruits of their unique talent and labor. Possesing a fifty thousand productivity power multiplier, good luck competing with them, good luck subduing them by force should you be foolish enough to attempt it.

Many bulldozzer inventors have already quit, or seeing the lower effort-reward curves never even bothered rising to such exceptionalism, living instead good and happy lives of relative obscurity. Many of these formidable innovating human resources, after achieving modest gains, and faced with a fifty percent tax on each additional dollar they earn (e.g. if they live in California or Europe), a death tax, and exit taxes, have already retreated to relative obscurity enjoying less pecuniary but untaxable joys of life. Many more will choose that path under the advancing class-warfare attitudes. Meanwhile, equally disastrously, an increasing number of shovel diggers will be encouraged to remain shovel diggers since they will be promised at least partial insulation from the consequences of mediocrity – enough insulation to choose to remain relatively happy mediocre shovel diggers. America, welcome to European dynamics. If the western world wants to maintain its four to six times average world standard of living, it cannot afford to flatten its effort-reaward curves and pigeonwhole the innovation of free enterprise into collective national economic management. The three billion souls of the emerging world who have finally and belatedly found some at least partial freedom, have neither the patience nor the desire to see how the western world’s experiment with mandatory collectivism turns out. The west will be absorbed into worldwide mediocrity in short order.

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Or maybe (to reurn to the post’s theme) I’m all wrong. Maybe the human-bee model turns out to be most efficient, some human society of altered humans where all bulldozzer inventors enthousiastically leave their homes and families every morning to go work AND do high value work for distant others (though I suspect that the very genetic engineering of humans — which has so far been anathema to liberals, but who knows it is generally more up their alley of central manipulation.. — will likely have to provide this new human species, but that is another story). Or perhaps there can be competing verieties of societies, though I suspect this is verbotten for advocates of mandatory collectivism (either from the left or the right) as Mrs Blankerhorn and Mr Buiter demonstrate.

But I’m optimistic that natural selection and evolution will continue to apply to cultures just as much as it applies to species. The future belongs to those jurisdictions who let indiviuals keep the fruits of their labor. These will be countries populated by mobile global citizens who can do high value work for anyone from everywhere. These will be countries populated by widely travelling individuals who will regularly see and be keenly aware of how much more prosperous their country is compared to the world average. They will then be happy to live on 100k per year (or whatever the inflated equivalent in the future is) and let those more competent earning multiple times their own income also keep the fruits of their labor, seing how much luckier they are compared to a world average living on 10k (or whatever the inflated equivalent is at the time).

Do tax havens still accept money from US citizens? I understand that most non-US banks don’t anymore.
Which is ironic, since tax havens ultimately rely on the Pax Americana for their security… though I somewhat doubt that Obama would go to war to protect a tax haven.