In an article in the May edition of Prospect magazine, Nicholas Shaxton makes a good point.  The scandal exposed in the Mossack Fonseca revelations doesn’t only allow individuals to take money elsewhere to avoid tax.  More importantly these havens allow them to escape the laws and rules of society they don’t like.  Most of the dubious people involved use companies like Mossak Fonseca to illicitly hide funds, whether they are Russians squirrelling away their secret holdings in strategic sectors of the economy, Mafia bosses hiding drug proceeds, Ponzi schemers, Nazi-looted art “owners” or bribes connected with Fifa or the Olympic Games. The wealthiest people in the world can not only avoid tax but be exempted from obeying the law.

Estimates of wealth in offshore accounts range between $7 and 36 trillion.  You read it correctly!  A more accurate, though uglier, description of these havens is “secrecy jurisdictions”.  

There is a theory (shall we call it that?) that one of the main reasons for the dreadful record of parliaments, presidents and others that have ruled us in recent years is that they are vetted and chosen, not for their devotion to democracy or expertise in education or whatever, but as protectors and dogsbodies of the super-rich and vested interests, who fund them and pay for election expenses.  I really don’t believe this is universal, but watching political behaviour in just two “bastions of liberty and democracy” (that is, the United States and the United Kingdom) it is clear that you don’t need many fundamentally corrupt nobodies to drag the system down.

We had an opportunity in the US to elect a genuine reformer with a healthy suspicion of elites, super-rich and  the corrupt, even if his detailed plans to bring them to order were/are a trifle sketchy.  Regrettably, it looks like another opportunity has been lost. The establishment will restore its own version of law and order in the next few months.  Just watch and wonder.  Epicurus would give up and return to his Garden.