In 1982, libertarian professor Murray Rothbard argued "Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one's house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns."
For publicizing the polar opposite of libertarian ideology, count on state-subsidized National Public Radio. Why publicize a book by a university press, written by a 28-year-old assistant professor? Because he’s a socialist attacking the “scourge of tax havens.” On Monday's All Things Considered, anchor Ari Shapiro suggested to author Gabriel Zucman that the taxing government was the "cops" and the tax evaders were somehow the "robbers."
SHAPIRO: Talk about the real-world impact of this kind of behavior. If a corrupt oligarch gets rich in ways that he's not supposed to, who is actually harmed by that?
ZUCMAN: The people, you know, of the country are harmed by that. You know, if billionaires pay very little in taxes, it means that the rest of us - we have to pay more. So it means more taxes for the middle class, and so we all pay the cost of tax evasion by the wealthiest individuals.
SHAPIRO: Given the sheer magnitude of this, when you look at the Justice Department trying to penalize these behaviors, does the - I suppose if you look at it as cops and robbers, do the cops seem up to the task of stopping the robbers?
ZUCMAN: At this stage, no. You know, we've had extensive anti-money laundering regulations in place since the late-1980s, and we keep discovering year after year that the basic rules are constantly violated by a number of offshore financial institutions, and so we can rely on these rules and on some audits from time to time to curb this criminal activity.
Vanessa Houlder of the Financial Times explained in a book review of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens that Zucman is a disciple of socialist all-star Thomas Piketty:
A web of tax havens holds almost a tenth of the world’s financial wealth. Evasion by the super-rich has pushed trillions of dollars out of governments’ reach. Only by prising open the secrets of the offshore centres can politicians rescue their debt-ridden economies and reverse the tide of rising inequality.
This is the message of a provocative new book by Gabriel Zucman, a 28-year-old assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. In Zucman’s view, tax havens are a fast-growing danger to the world economy and policymakers need urgently to step up their efforts to curb them.
The Hidden Wealth of Nations promises to make quite a splash. It has a title that echoes Adam Smith and an enthusiastic foreword by Thomas Piketty, author of the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, who supervised Zucman’s doctorate....
In Piketty’s foreword, he urges all those interested in inequality, global justice and the future of democracy to read the book. The wealthy among them might want to take particular note. Attacking tax havens is a crucial first step to ratcheting up taxation on the rich. The more information there is about offshore assets, the harder they will be to defend.
Zucman guesses that at least $7.6 trillion is locked away in tax havens, mostly in what he calls the “sinister trio” of the British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Like a good socialist, he compares tax evasion to greenhouse gases: "Financial secrecy—like greenhouse gas emissions—has a costly impact on the entire world, which tax havens choose to ignore.”
