George Monbiot gives us two humorous quotes about the avaricious rich.
Executive flight is the corporate world’s only effective form of self-regulation: those who are too selfish to pay what they owe to society send themselves into voluntary exile. It’s an act of self-sacrifice for which we should all be grateful. It’s hard on the Swiss, but there’s a kind of mortal justice here too: if you sustain a crooked system of banking secrecy and tax avoidance, you end up with a country full of crooks and tax avoiders.
And for a 2-hit combo:
International attempts to close down tax havens remain half-hearted. But if by some miracle these measures were to succeed, one haven – let’s say St Helena – should be kept open. It should be furnished only with rudimentary homes. All who chose to could live there in peace. Every penny they possessed would remain safe from the taxman, as long as they never set foot in another land. They could sit in their cells and count their money for the rest of their lives. Parties of schoolchildren would be brought to the island to goggle at these hermits, and learn some lessons about the follies of wealth.
On a related note, we need more humor in the anti-capitalist movement.
It was a fascinating article, but I find it hard to take seriously the statement that avoiding taxation is avoiding what you owe to "society". That presumes that a given government's budget is in fact helping society, surely something that anarchists should balk at!
Ah, they guy writing this is a social democrat so obviously I disagree with him in a lot of things. However, I consider a world where the rich pay taxes to be a better alternative than a world where they do not.
Plus, this article is lulz-worthy 🙂
True; in a sense you could say the profits made by business owners/capitalists are a form of "taxation" as well, people just sort of use different words depending on which monolithic entity is taking a % of your earnings.