What’s the worst policy idea that would cause the most damage to society?
I’m tempted to say the value-added tax since our hopes of restraining the federal government will be greatly undermined if we give the buffoons in Washington a new source of revenue. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Mitt Romney may be an ever greater long-term threat to American exceptionalism than Barack Obama.
But even though the VAT is fiscal poison, it’s not the most dangerous policy proposal.
At the top of my list is global taxation.
I wrote in 2010 about some of the awful global tax schemes being pushed by the United Nations. And I also noted that unrepentant statists such as George Soros are pimping for global taxation.
I even wrote a paper back in 2001 to explain why global taxes are such a bad idea.
The details of the tax don’t matter. It’s the principle.
A supra-national taxing authority inevitably would mean bigger government and more statism. As such, it doesn’t matter whether the new global tax is imposed on financial transactions, carbon emissions, tobacco, the Internet, munitions, foreign exchange, pollution permits, energy, or airline tickets.
And the statists are not giving up. Here are passages from a news report on their latest scheme.
…civil society leaders demanded a basic level of social security as they promoted a “social protection floor” at a preparatory forum for the Commission on Social Development, which began Feb. 1. The focus of the forum was “universal access to basic social protection and social services.” “No one should live below a certain income level,” stated Milos Koterec, President of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. “Everyone should be able to access at least basic health services, primary education, housing, water, sanitation and other essential services.” These services were presented at the forum as basic human rights equal to the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The money to fund these services may come from a new world tax. “We will need a modest but long-term way to finance this transformation,” stated Jens Wandel, Deputy Director of the United Nations Development Program. “One idea which we could consider is a minimal financial transaction tax (of .005 percent). This will create $40 billion in revenue.” “It is absolutely essential to establish controls on capital movements and financial speculation,” said Ambassador Jorge Valero, the current Chairman of the Commission on Social Development. He called for “progressive policies of taxation” that would require “those who earn more to pay more taxes.” Valero’s speech to the forum focused on capitalism as the source of the world financial problems.
This is unfettered statism, class warfare, and redistributionism, which is what you might expect from proponents of global taxation. But the part that really stands out is the assertion that government should guarantee a “certain income level” with freebies for things such as healthcare and housing.
If this sounds familiar, you probably saw the post about Franklin Roosevelt’s authoritarian proposal for a “Second Bill of Rights” that would guarantee “rights” to jobs, recreation, housing, good health, and security.
Remember, though, that whenever a leftist asserts the right to be given something, that person simultaneously and necessarily is demanding a right to take from someone else. This is why I deliberately chose to call the proposal authoritarian.
But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to the issue of global taxation.
The most important thing to understand is that leftists want global taxation. To get the ball rolling, they’ll take any tax for any purpose. They simply want to get the camel’s nose under the tent.
Once the precedent of global taxation has been established, then it’s a relatively simple matter for politicians to augment the first levy with additional taxes. Perhaps the camel analogy would be more accurate if we referred to some other part of the animal and warned that taxpayers won’t be happy when they learn where it’s going to be inserted.
The bad news is that some American politicians already have endorsed this scheme, most notably Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House.
But the good news is that global taxation is a toxic issue, which means politicians who have to get votes from non-crazy people are very reluctant to support taxing powers for the United Nations or any other entity. President Obama, for instance, already has rejected some global tax proposals and his Administration has been resisting other European proposals for global taxation.
But don’t be deluded into thinking the White House actually is good on these issues. This is the Administration, after all, that avidly supports a scheme from an American-funded Paris-based bureaucracy that would result in something akin to an international tax organization. Same bad concept, but different approach.
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[…] not safely out of New York City, and I promise I didn’t drink any of the Kool-Aid. I’m still a critic of international bureaucracies. And I wouldn’t allow myself to be bought off by a lavish, tax-free job at the United […]
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[…] since the United Nations has a long track record of supporting global taxation (with the money going to the U.N., of course), I’m even less […]
[…] since the United Nations has a long track record of supporting global taxation (with the money going to the U.N., of course), I’m even less […]
[…] not safely out of New York City, and I promise I didn’t drink any of the Kool-Aid. I’m still a critic of international bureaucracies. And I wouldn’t allow myself to be bought off by a lavish, tax-free job at the United […]
[…] out of New York City, and I promise I didn’t drink any of the Kool-Aid. I’m still a critic of international bureaucracies. And I wouldn’t allow myself to be bought off by a lavish, tax-free job at the United […]
[…] reason. With the support of statists such as George Soros, the U.N. pushes for crazy ideas such as global taxation and global […]
[…] reason. With the support of statists such as George Soros, the UN pushes for crazy ideas such as global taxation and global […]
[…] (1) Especially by transnational bureaucracies answerable to no one and supported by global taxes. […]
[…] reason. With the support of statists such as George Soros, the U.N. pushes for crazy ideas such as global taxation and global […]
[…] by Dan Mitchell […]
[…] Posted: February 20th, 2012 by Gadget42 by Dan Mitchell […]
[…] I’ve criticized centralization of power in Washington, and I’ve condemned efforts for global “economic governance.” […]
[…] I’ve criticized centralization of power in Washington, and I’ve condemned efforts for global “economic governance.” […]
They can impose them but they won’t be paid, The congress nor the president can enter into a treaty or agreement with a foreign entity like the U.N as it is a constitutional violation, ergo it would be null and void. J.C.
[…] I’ve criticized centralization of power in Washington, and I’ve condemned efforts for global “economic governance.” […]
The Global Warming pseudoscience is almost dead (United Nations wanted to impose $trillions in global taxes based on the theory that humans were causing cataclysmic global warming). My forecast was that Global Warming would be dead after 2015. But now in 2012 it is almost dead -lets see how the current La Niña (it cools the planet) unfolds. Lets hope that this absolute horror of Global Taxation will never pass. We do not need to watch horror movies, United Nations proposals are scariest than ANY horror movie. GOSH!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t putting everyone at a certain income level just lead to inflation, putting those people back in relatively the same place as where they started?
What do they imagine is the end game here? Let’s pretend it actually worked (like in Europe for a sixty year cycle) what you end up with when you’ve freed up the masses from want? You don’t get happy, productive masses but rather an inert group that fails to reproduce, create or grow. Now less people may be a good thing to the masters of the universe types but stagnation follows.
Nothing good for the people flows from this; only harm to the people.
“It is absolutely essential to establish controls on capital movements and financial speculation,” said Ambassador Jorge Valero, the current Chairman of the Commission on Social Development.
This is evil, none shall escape mode of thinking. I don’t want to live in this world, and I’m getting the feeling I’m not going to get a meaningful vote.
Mr. Mitchell,
You are really bent on spoiling weekends…
« La Francificaton mondiale, elle est enfin arrivé.! …et me tient éveillé la nuit. »
If the alternative for humanity is a Global French Government, then even the Taliban, N. Korea, Iran and the like, start being seen in the light of welcome diversity.
That being said, this gets my vote for Freddy Krueger post of the year.
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But odious as it is, I believe it will not work. “We just cannot all get along, you know.” — thank God!
It is telling that declining Europe is falling apart, away from uniformity (no not quite yet, this is just the beginning, there will be first a few final integration chapters before final disintegration, as even flatter effort-reward curves drag Europeans down to per capita prosperity equaling more and more the world average (as in astronomy, with spent fuel, the star turns inward before the core collapses into a supernova) — and the US seems to have been captured by the gravitational field of the same black hole, to continue with astronomical analogies. Not quite past the event horizon as Europe, the same fate seems all but inevitable for the US — sorry folks, it does not happen often that humanity gets to discover a whole new continent, and you finally blew it. You exhausted your initial exceptional and unparalleled 1776 infusion of freedom, now down to near freedom-parity with the rest of the world. So your economic convergence has now become all but deterministic.
But I’m also digressing,
As some, perhaps even most, of the world descends into this slow, UN imposed, global collectivism of compounding slow growth, where those obsessed in imposing mandatory compassion and big-uniformity remain stalled at 5 year life expectancy gains and effective average income gains of 20%
…while those who do not subscribe to such uniformity get to double their life expectancy and be seven times richer in the next century,… or earlier,
the incentives to flaunt such uniformity will dramatically increase and outliers will either resist joining or break free.
Too bad those outliers will have to probably get nuclear weapons (or whatever the replacement nukes of the future might be) to stay free. As I have said in the past, if I were Swiss I’d be very worried surrounded by neighbors in a deterministic decline path. Declining cultures tend to turn nasty.
Who knows? Perhaps in one hundred years, the most prosperous people will be once odious cultures …like the Taliban — having successfully flaunted the imposition of global Francification. I’m sure the future is full of surprises we cannot today even imagine.