Great Moments in Human Rights

Forget the Magna Carta and the Constitution. Finland is now on the cutting edge of protecting, promoting, and guaranteeing fundamental rights. As the BBC story excerpted below reports, Finland has announced that broadband access is now a legal right! Yes, you're reading it here first. But not just the right to broadband. Apparently one megabit per second is a human right today and 100 megabits per second is a human right by 2015. I gather this is the Finnish version of a "living, breathing" right. My only question, though, is whether older Finns can sue the government for failing to provide this right back in the awful, deprived days before Al Gore invented the Internet?

From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015. In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but has stopped short of enshrining this as a right in law. The Finnish deal means that from 1 July all telecommunications companies will be obliged to provide all residents with broadband lines that can run at a minimum 1Mbps speed.

Nazis, Communists, and Moral Bankruptcy

Jeff Jacoby righteously - and rightfully - condemns the moral perversion that allows people to overlook the barbaric cruelty and oppression of communism.

If Jose Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leading publishers would never have brought out his books, his works would not have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the head of Portugal’s government would never have said on his death — as Prime Minister José Sócrates did say last week — that he was “one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer." But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist. And not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an "unabashed" (Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP), “unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer. A member since 1969 of Portugal’s hardline Communist Party, Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist’’ who in all the years since had "found nothing better." ...the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran. In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power. Mass murder and terror have always been intrinsic to communism. “Many archives and witnesses prove conclusively,’’ wrote Stéphane Courtois in his introduction to “The Black Book of Communism,’’ a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, “that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern communism.’’ The uniqueness of the Holocaust notwithstanding, the savageries of communism and of Nazism are morally interchangeable — except that the former began much earlier than the latter, lasted much longer, and shed far more blood.

Greetings From Panama

I'm on my may to El Salvador to give a speech about the principles of good fiscal policy and I stopped off in Panama for a luncheon speech sponsored by the Fundacion Libertad about the dangers of excessive government spending. I have two observations based on my day of discussions.

First, Panama has a very large banking sector, in part because it is a tax haven and in part because it is a "dollarized" economy. But Panama, like Canada, did not have any sectoral problems during the financial crisis. Why? Because unlike the United States, there are no policies to subsidize housing. There is no Fannie Mae, no Freddie Mac, and no Community Reinvestment Act. So even though there has been a housing boom in Panama City that has since cooled off, this did not lead to significant problems since banks had no government-created incentive to make zero-downpayment loans or offer loans to people with inadequate income and assets.

Second, Panama is a safe haven for oppressed people in Latin America. Many people from unstable regimes such as Venezuela have fled to Panama - or at least moved their money to Panama - to protect their families. Other people from places such as Ecuador and Argentina have moved their money to Panama to guard against expropriation and theft by corrupt governments. And others from nations like Mexico have placed their money in Panama because of rampant crime and kidnapping in their home nations - often triggered when corrupt bureaucrats in national tax offices sell information to criminal gangs. Putting money in Panama minimizes these terrible risks because so-called tax havens have strong human rights policies that protect financial privacy. But for many Latin Americans, the goal is not to protect against punitive taxation, but rather to guard against thuggish and incompetent governments. These are some of the issues highlighted in this video about "The Moral Case for Tax Havens."



For taxpayers from North America and Western Europe, tax havens are an important safety valve to guard against bloated and wasteful government. For taxpayers in most other parts of the world, though, tax havens can mean the difference between life and death. So every time you hear greedy politicians like Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy attack tax havens, remember that they are willing to put people's lives at risk to promote their big government agenda.

Should Banks Be Forced by the Government to Spy on Consumers?

There's a principled Fourth Amendment argument against anti-money laundering laws. In this video, however, I mostly focus on the cost-benefit issue, explaining that the fight against crime will be more effective if law enforcement is not forced to look for a needle in a haystack.

A Victory for the Rule of Law over IRS Bullying

A Swiss court just threw a wrench in the gears of an IRS effort to impose bad US tax law on an extraterritorial basis, ruling that UBS does not have to hand over data to the American tax authorities. This ruling nullifies an agreement that the Swiss government was coerced into making with the US government last year. In typical arrogant fashion, the IRS already has indicated that it still expects acquiescence, notwithstanding Switzerland's strong human rights policy on personal privacy. The Bloomberg story excerpted below has the details, but it's worth noting that this entire fight exists solely because the internal revenue code imposes double taxation on income that is saved and invested and imposes that bad policy on economic activity outside America's border. But just as other governments should not have the right to impose their laws on things that happen in America, the United States should not have the right to trample the sovereignty of other nations:

A UBS AG account holder won a Swiss court case preventing data from being disclosed in a ruling that may impede a U.S. crackdown on overseas tax evasion. The failure by U.S. citizens to complete certain tax forms or declare income doesn’t constitute “tax fraud” that would require Switzerland to disclose account data, the country’s Federal Administrative Court ruled in a judgment released today. ...“The prosecutors at the Justice Department are not going to be happy with this opinion,” Namorato said in an interview in Washington. “It guts the settlement that they negotiated with the Swiss authorities.” ...The Swiss government said in a statement that it will decide Jan. 27 how the Swiss-U.S. agreement can be implemented in light of the ruling. U.S. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to comment. ...The Internal Revenue Service said in a statement that while the agency hadn’t reviewed the ruling it “had every expectation that the Swiss government will continue to honor the terms of the agreement.” ...Today’s ruling involved a single test case, and the court said there were 25 more involving similar claims that it will ask the Swiss tax authority to review. “It’s a landmark decision,” said Bernhard Loetscher a partner at Zurich-based law firm CMS von Erlach Henrici AG. “The court considers the case so crystal clear that it invited the SFTA to withdraw the 25 other claims.” ...Under the 1996 double taxation treaty, “tax fraud and the like” means fraudulent behavior that causes or attempts an illegal and important reduction in tax owed. Examples included keeping separate accounts of incorrect profit, losses and orders, as well as a scheme of lies. Switzerland distinguishes between tax fraud, which is a crime, and tax evasion, which is a civil offense. “The U.S. will soon start to renegotiate the double taxation treaty, to give up the distinction between tax evasion and tax fraud,” said Zurich lawyer Wolfram Kuoni. “The key battle will be if it will apply retrospectively.”

This battle is part of a broader effort by uncompetitive nations to persecute "tax havens." Creating a tax cartel for the benefit of greedy politicians in France, Germany, and the United States would be a mistake. An "OPEC for politicians" would pave the way for higher taxes, as explained here, here, and here. But this also is a human rights issue. Look at what happened recently in the thugocracy known as Venezuela, where Chavez began a new wave of expropriation. The Venezuelans with money in Cayman, Miami, and Switzerland were safe, but the people with assets inside the country have been ripped off by a criminal government. Or what about people subjected to persecution, such as political dissidents in Russia? Or Jews in North Africa? Or ethnic Chinese in Indonesia? Or homosexuals in Iran? And how about people in places such as Mexico where kidnappings are common and successful people are targeted, often on the basis of information leaked from tax departments. This world needs safe havens, jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that offer oppressed people the protection of honest courts, financial privacy, and the rule of law. Heck, even the bureaucrat in charge of the OECD's anti-tax competition campaign admitted to a British paper that "tax havens are essential for individuals who live in unstable regimes." With politicians making America less stable with each passing day, let's hope this essential freedom is available in the future.