The term “tax havens” doesn’t accurately describe them

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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.

Are the British selling too many homes to foreign investors?

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Everyone agrees that “Britain’s housing problem is one of supply and demand. If only they could build more homes, the crisis would ease. But it’s not that simple. For instance, in London new flats are going up all the time, yet housing remains in chronically short supply because so many properties – old and new, but mostly new – are being sold to overseas investors. In 2012, foreign buyers accounted for almost three-quarters of new homes sold in central London. And many developers and estate agents now market their properties in China and elsewhere before even offering them for sale to people who live in the UK. (This is absolutely true. Ed). It sounds “almost racist” to object, but the result of this speculation has been to push prices to crazy levels in London, with knock-on effects for the rest of the UK. It’s a relatively simple problem to fix: we could just “ban the ownership of housing by foreign non-residents, as they do in Norway and Australia”. We need more homes, but there’s not much point in building them if they’re just going to stand empty. (Zoe Williams, The Guardian)

I have to declare an interest. I was born in London, am a British citizen, and still have a flat in London, although I also live in America. My family has lived in and around London since 1672. Within walking distance of the flat are six Russian oligarchs and, as far as I can ascertain, only one family, a hundred metres away. I am conflicted about all this – British-born people used to live in London and now have to commute; the young people are priced out of the property market, and shop and restaurant jobs are filled by foreigners who are often there short-term to improve their English and who undercut the British. This all feeds into the desire of many voters to exit the EU and stop immigration.

But if you could force the thousands of foreigners to sell and go home (practically speaking impossible) the prices are still too high for most British people. We have created an increasingly exclusive city State on a rather small island. Maybe one could ban all future house purchases by foreigners; or introduce a super-property-tax for the non-British citizens; or slap a purchase tax on foreigners buying property, say 20% of the property value. What do you think?

The rot set in when the UK government offered residency and a British passport to people who “invested” in Britain. Nobody protested at the time that “investment”might mean buying up apartments and houses in London. How much real “investment” has there been in the economy and how many jobs have been created with this dubious come-hither offer? A suspicious person might conclude that members of the Conservative government with houses in London have made a tidy personal profit? What a suspicious mind!

Addictions

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A letter to a Washington Post agony aunt deplores the fact that the writer’s partner is obsessed with her cellphone and ignores him constantly while they are together, head down, searching the web, sending texts etc. All protests are ignored; the lady is hooked.

If it were not the cellphone it might well be painkillers, alcohol, or worse. Some people are susceptible to addiction. But in general I’m afraid we have to get used to others obsessing over cellphones, attending to those who are absent instead of those who are present, regardless of who they are.

It used to be said that no man is an island unto himself. Now I’m not so sure. What I’m fairly certain of is that someone, somewhere is going to have a go at justifying this rude behaviour, on the grounds that it’s “cool”, it’s good for your health, it “keeps my boyfriend interested”, or “it’s a way of signalling to your companion to quietly get lost”. Who knows? Me? I’m old-fashioned – I like to think I take an interest in my companion, ask questions about her life and opinions, empathize, get her talking. That I personally call polite. Of course, it works both ways. It’s flattering if the interest is reciprocated.

Surprise! Surprise!

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Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference. Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing — but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Like other big businesses the media is now owned by rich people who presumably have a good reason for buying in to TV or news organisations. To make a big thing of bias at Facebook is ridiculous. Does anyone seriously think that the Murdoch media empire offers unbiased news? At the very best one has to read news with a hefty dose of suspicion. The old days when a reporter told it as it was is long gone. In Britain bias is a given. The way the Daily Telegraph reports news inevitably reflects the bias of the staff and the prejudices of the readers. And no doubt other readers think the Guardian is biased in the opposite direction. This is where education comes in. An educated person, taught to think for himself, can look behind the headlines and ask, “Why are they featuring this? From whose perspective is it being written? Whose interests are being represented? In Washington I ask myself these questions every morning of the Washington Post (owner: Jeff Bezos, from Amazon).