Germany is not alone in the rush to embrace socialism. France does too.
This should come as no suprise to anyone, from a country with stifling labor legislation, quasi-legal segregation, high unemployment rates (even higher among minorities). As I’ve blogged previously, France’s right to work laws are a joke:
With an unemployment rate as high as it is (50% for some demographics), it doesn’t seem that France’s current system has done a very good job protecting [the "right" to work"]. I can’t imagine a situation where it could possibly be more difficult to find employment than one in which persists a staggering 23% unemployment.
Richard Ebeling notes that the French, being Franchmen, however, will take a more cowardly route than Germany’s unabashed and public adoration for all things socialist. The French, Ebeling tells us, plan to introduce more socialism, but call it capitalism.
French and German governments are calling for the new international financial order to set a cap on corporate executive pay, worldwide. They want tax havens like Switzerland to be put on a blacklist and penalized through regulatory and fiscal methods for providing Europeans a place to guard their hard earned income from the grasping hand of their respective governments.
Some people are already saying that the U.S. is now more French than France.
For some reason, I can see the demagogues here latching on to that sort of populist mentality: let’s go after the “tax havens”. Then, Papa Government can tax people who don’t even live here, or people who plan to move away will be required to pay a penalty tax. Oh, wait: THEY ALREADY DO THIS.
Nobody ever presumes that our own government should instead lower the taxes levied on our own compatriots.
Instead, they all advocate a Mutually Assured Destruction situation, where all countries compete and conspire to keep taxes high, and above all, to prevent people from being free.
Seems like Fascism is on the rise by everyone in the western world.
Why is it human beings in say the private sector who have to get you to pay them are somehow bad people while an institution of Human Beings in say government uses violence to fund itself is somehow considered honorable?
Human beings are human beings you can call them whatever you want. Imagine if Wal-Mart forced you to buy their stuff people would freak.
Indoctrination works way too well. Governments fail over and over yet people want to make them bigger and more powerful. Most of humanity must be a bunch of masochists.
A quibble with the quote: Switzerland has never really been regarded as a tax haven, which is a jurisdiction where it may be very advantageous for tax reasons to establish residency or to domicile a business, trust or other legal structure. Switzerland is famous for its banking secrecy, though, which made it a favorable place to stash one’s loose millions. This has been undergoing a steady erosion, though, especially since the early 90s at the instigation of the OECD’s Financial Action Task Force (read: statist international thieves’ guild).