Hypocrisy Alert: International Bureaucrats Seek to Create Global Tax Cartel – Yet They Get Tax-Free Salaries

Richard Rahn has an excellent column in the Washington Times, discussing how the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is working with high-tax nations to bully low-tax jurisdictions into adopting bad policy. Yet these bureuacrats rather conveniently don’t have to pay any income tax. No wonder they are oblivious to the real-world destructive impact of punitive tax rates. The column also explains that this bullying campaign is backfiring against America since some foreign financial institutions have decided to pull money out of America in order to avoid being turned into stooges for the IRS:

The high-tax countries are using the OECD to threaten low-tax jurisdictions to sign this agreement. It is worth noting that the tax bullies at the OECD and at other international organizations, such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, who demand that others pay higher taxes, enjoy tax-free personal income courtesy of the world’s taxpayers. Freedom House, an organization that keeps its eye on human rights abuses and anti-democratic activities by countries, lists a number of the countries on the OECD list of cooperating jurisdictions as “not free” or only “partly free” — including Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Yet some democratic and free jurisdictions have been listed as noncooperating by the OECD. According to the OECD, the U.S. should be sharing tax information with nondemocratic and/or corrupt countries on its list. Worse yet, the Obama administration is supporting the OECD in this wholesale violation of basic rights. …The good news is that some in low-tax jurisdictions are beginning to fight back. Last week, the head of the oldest bank in Switzerland (who holds a doctorate in economics from a leading U.S. university) said he was no longer going to invest in the United States because he found the new IRS regulations — which foreign banks must follow — so vague, onerous and incomprehensible that he could never be sure his bank was not at risk. In addition, he argued that the economic path the U.S. is taking can only lead to slower growth, and his bank sees better opportunities elsewhere. From the time of the Reagan economic reforms a quarter of a century ago until last year, the United States had the highest average rate of growth of the major developed countries. A substantial part of this growth was fueled by foreign investment in our nation. Those in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department (including the IRS) who are working with the tax bullies at the OECD are driving away much of the foreign investment at a time when it is most needed.

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Maybe the Collectivists Will (Un)Breed Themselves Out of Existence

The UK-based Telegraph reports that some outfit called the Optimal Population Trust is suggesting that people should have fewer babies to fight supposed global warming (or climate change, or whatever they’re calling it now). This is a reflection of the people-are-bad mentality that seems disturbingly common among enviro-statists:

The report, Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concludes that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended. …Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust at the LSE, said: “It’s always been obviously that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions.

Reading this article, though, reminded me of another article from a British paper. As this story from the Daily Mail explains, some radical environmentalists are deliberately choosing to sterlilize themselves to avoid having kids:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers – and a voice calling her Mummy. But the very thought makes her shudder with horror. Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet. …Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time. He refused, but Toni – who works for an environmental charity – “relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery. …”Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35. “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.” …Toni is far from alone. When Sarah Irving, 31, was a teenager she sat down and wrote a wish-list for the future. …Most young girls dream of marriage and babies. But Sarah dreamed of helping the environment – and as she agonised over the perils of climate change, the loss of animal species and destruction of wilderness, she came to the extraordinary decision never to have a child. “I realised then that a baby would pollute the planet – and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do.” …Mark adds: “Sarah and I live as green a life a possible. We don’t have a car, cycle everywhere instead, and we never fly. “We recycle, use low-energy light bulbs and eat only organic, locally produced food. “In short, we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. But all this would be undone if we had a child.”

Think about what this means. If the nut-job environmentalists persist in not having kids, that almost surely means the world’s population will gradually become more sensible about these issue since mommy and daddy enviro-statist won’t be raising little interventionists to plague future generations. Sounds like a win-win situation for everyone.

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