Crackdown on tax havens is just another way to ensure citizens can’t escape the clutches of big data
Niall Ferguson says the trend of government and business tracking our every move – in some cases, in an attempt to deter crime – exposes us to another kind of danger, that of surveillance
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky fired a broadside against all the Victorian do-gooders who dreamt of a perfectly rational society. “You seem certain that man himself will give up erring of his own free will,” he fulminated. He foresaw a ghastly future in which “all human acts will be listed in something like logarithm tables … and transferred to a timetable … [that] will carry detailed calculations and exact forecasts of everything to come”. In such a world, his utilitarian contemporaries believed, there would be no wrongdoing. It would have been planned, legislated and regulated out of existence.
We are nearly there. Or so it seems.
Tax havens have no justification, say top economists, calling for their abolition
Yes, I know. Corruption is impure. Crime is a felony. And illegal immigration is against the law. Altogether: Sin is wicked! So I should have cheered British Prime Minister David Cameron’s international anti-corruption summit last week. I should be a paid-up supporter of the campaign to close down tax havens. I should be glad to see the back of 500-euro bills. And I should feel a thrill of patriotic pride when I hear Boris Johnson pledge to regain control of Britain’s borders.
The state wants data. What you earn. What you spend. Where you are
And yet every one of these steps towards a more perfect world makes me feel Dostoevsky’s disquiet.
Now, I do not condone corruption, tax evasion, organised crime or unregulated migration. Nevertheless, I am deeply suspicious of the concerted effort to address all these problems in ways that markedly increase the power of states – and not just any states but specifically the world’s big states – at the expense of both small states and the individual. What makes me especially wary is that today, unlike in Dostoevsky’s time, the technology exists to give those big states, along with a few private companies, just the kind of control he dreaded.
Consider some of the most recent encroachments on liberty. The British government announced it will set up a publicly accessible register of beneficial owners (the individuals behind shell companies). In addition, offshore shell companies and other foreign entities that buy or own British property will henceforth be obliged to declare their owners in the new register. No doubt these measures will flush out or deter some villains. But there are perfectly legitimate reasons for a foreign national to want to own a property in Britain without having his or her name made public. Suppose you were an apostate from Islam threatened with death by jihadists, for example.
