Month: October 2021

Leftists are thrilled by the Biden administration’s plan to stamp out the bogeyman of tax havens—low-tax jurisdictions where corporations and other investors can keep their money away from the prying hands of the government.

They’d have us believe that corporations aren’t paying their “fair share” in taxes— and that punishing these scofflaws will bring worldwide benefits. In particular, congressional Democrats are now pushing a re-jiggering of the tax system as a means to fund their $2.9 trillion welfare-spending program.

“The administration’s strategy involves convincing other developed countries to adopt a global minimum tax for corporations, while reshaping the United States’ own tax code to stamp out the advantages companies currently get from booking their earnings in tax havens,” as Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann explained.

Some conservatives might support this redistributionist effort given that tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple are in the crosshairs. They shouldn’t let frustration with those companies’ content moderation policies let them jettison their long-term opposition to tax increases. After all, corporations don’t really pay taxes—only consumers and workers do.

Let’s dispense with the outrage about tax havens. There is nothing wrong with companies and individuals that shelter their earnings from governments, which are like organized mobs that can never seize enough revenue. One need only look at the U.S. government’s $28 trillion-plus in debt to realize that its spending desires are insatiable.

If you believe that tax havens are immoral, then you should not claim any deductions on your tax bill. President Joe Biden apparently thinks it’s wrong for corporations to locate their headquarters in low-tax Bermuda, Ireland, and Switzerland, yet why does his home of Delaware house so many U.S. corporate headquarters? Hint: It has nothing to do with the, er, lovely scenery around Wilmington.

California is a notorious high-tax state. In our federalist system, each state can develop its own tax policies, which is why so many corporations are moving to friendlier climes such as Texas and Utah. Such competition is a strength of the American system. A similar process works at the international level.

Tax havens provide pressure on big-spending governments to limit tax rates, and lower tax rates boost economic activity, create jobs, and incentivize investors to invest more. As economist Milton Friedman put it, “Competition among national governments in the public services they provide and in the taxes they impose is every bit as productive as competition among individuals or enterprises in the goods and services they offer for sale.”

Governments propose these anti-tax-haven rules simply to keep companies from evading their tax grabs, thus allowing them to tax and spend with abandon. The main reason tax havens are good is they help corporations shield their money from the U.S. government, which already has plenty of revenues (and debt)—and needs to learn to spend it more efficiently.

Practically speaking, policies that crush tax havens are counterproductive. One prominent 2018 study by Duke University professor Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato found that an IRS rule that increased corporate tax rates for U.S.-based multinational companies had the perverse effect of causing them to lower their domestic investment and employment.

Also on a practical note, “Offshore centers allow companies and investment funds to operate internationally without having to abide by several different sets of rules and, often, pay more tax than ought to be due,” noted the Institute for Economic Affairs’ Philip Booth. “They make it possible for businesses to avoid the worst excesses of government largesse and crazy tax systems.”

Furthermore, the Biden plan will raise taxes on reinsurance companies—insurance companies that provide insurance to other insurance companies—which simply will reduce the number of available insurance policies and raise rates on consumers.

Progressives argue that tax havens allow criminal enterprises to hide their ill-gotten loot, but the libertarian Cato Institute’s Daniel Mitchell (who deserves a hat-tip for that Friedman quotation) explains that “the most comprehensive analysis of dirty money finds 28 problem jurisdictions, and only one could be considered a tax haven.”

And he adds that tax havens also allow people living in oppressive regimes (such as Jews in some Middle Eastern countries and dissidents in Venezuela or Cuba) “to invest their assets offshore and keep that information hidden from venal governments.”

After looking at how the U.S. government spends its money, it’s hard to take seriously the claims of the tax-haven foes, such as Oxfam International: “Big business is dodging tax on an industrial scale, depriving governments across the globe of the money they need to address poverty and invest in healthcare, education, and jobs.”

Oh please. If eliminating poverty were a function of the size of government tax receipts, then America (and California in particular) would have solved that problem decades ago. Those who oppose tax havens simply want the government to take more money and have more power. That’s why I celebrate the wonders of offshore havens.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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One of the few people definitely having fun in No Time To Die, the new Bond film, is Ana de Armas, who scurries away with the picture during her relatively brief time onscreen. Armas plays a CIA agent called Paloma, and while her revelation that she’s only had three weeks’ training makes Bond (Daniel Craig again) a little nervous at first, he needn’t have worried—in no time at all she’s dropping bad guys with a repertoire of flying head kicks and full-auto chatter-gun salvos that might constitute a successful audition for the job of 008. It’s too bad she isn’t allowed to stick around (although she at least gets to leave under her own power, unlike many a disposable Bond girl of the past).

Armas’ sparkling presence highlights the surprising droopiness of much of the rest of the movie. Oh, there are the usual lashings of action—fists fly, snarling antagonists tangle, trashed Euro cars twirl through the air—and some of it (a mad motorcycle ascent of a flight of ancient stone steps, Bond’s blind leap off a bridge tethered only by a length of guide rope) is impressive. It’s just not quite up to the gloriously ridiculous standards of earlier entries in the 007 franchise. And in a picture that’s said to have cost some $250 million to make, glorious is what we want, and maybe ridiculous, too.

What we get instead, in a movie that runs two hours and 43 minutes, is quite a bit of talk. Because there’s quite a bit to talk about—to explain, mainly. First of all, psychiatrist Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), back from Spectre, the last Bond film, seems now to be firmly established in the role of Bond’s number-one lady. In a long and strangely flat introductory sequence, set years ago, we see Madeleine as a little girl being stalked across a frozen lake by a man in a creepy white Noh mask. This later turns out to be a demented terrorist called Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek, bearing perhaps the silliest Bond character name since Denise Richards’ Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough). Lyutsifer, of course, wants to conquer the world, or maybe destroy it. Something like that.

Safin is headquartered on a remote island not unlike the ones occupied in the past by the villain of Dr. No, and by Donald Pleasence’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. First-time Bond director Cary Joji Fukunaga has no qualms about deploying nostalgic callbacks in this movie, among them Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger—its retractable machine guns still fully functional—and, rather oddly, “We Have All the Time in the World,” the touching farewell song for Bond’s newly deceased wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, now repurposed for another nostril-quivering moment in this film. (Fukunaga also attempts to undo one of the indignities imposed upon Bond in the 2006 Casino Royale—Craig’s first appearance in the role—in which a bartender put to him the traditional question of whether he wanted his martini shaken or stirred, and the new, more ostentatiously modern Bond replied, “Do I look like I give a damn?” Now, in another bar scene, he’s back to the traditional drink-making instruction.)

As No Time To Die begins, we find Bond retired from MI6 and living in Jamaica, separated from Madeleine after an explosive vacation incident in Italy. He thinks his spying days are over until he’s contacted by his old CIA buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who wants him to do a job for the Agency in Cuba, where an important scientist named Obruchev has just been abducted by Spectre. Obruchev was supervising the development of a powerful biological weapon called Heracles, designed to spread disease via DNA and to be practically invincible. The evil fiends of Spectre are the last people who should be allowed to get their hands on it. Bond departs for Cuba.

As the story proceeds—and proceeds, and proceeds—many things happen. Bond learns that Spectre has business cards. He learns that he’s been replaced at MI6 by a Black woman named Nomi (Lashana Lynch), and that she has inherited his old agent number, 007. And he is compelled to seek guidance from his longtime nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who still controls Spectre’s nefarious activities from inside the London mental facility to which he’s been confined (in a pointlessly elaborate and very Lecterlike glass cage). As soon as we once again savor Waltz’s purring menace in this role, we realize how insufficiently interesting Malek’s Lyutsifer Safin is, despite his island “poison garden” and his weird, parboiled face. Safin is the movie’s most serious flaw,

Its most successful element, disconcertingly, isn’t the usual abundance of gadgets (there’s only a tricky new watch) or the traditional byplay with a parade of seductive women (this is a movie with not a breath of sexy in it). What’s really most effective in the film is the romance between Bond and Madeleine. Craig hasn’t been encouraged to express much in his 15 years in the Bond role (this is his last go-round), but Seydoux seems to have a warming influence on him. And as Bond’s love story with Madeleine evolves, it’s hard not to be drawn in, and in the end to be moved by it.

All of which is well and good. But this is a Bond movie, for God’s sake. Where’s the snappy patter, the unconquerable joie de vivre? There are only a few things we demand of James Bond, and “I love you” isn’t one of them.

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10/1/1924: Chief Justice Rehnquist’s birthday.

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Do colleges and universities educate or indoctrinate? That question has been a sure-fire way to start an argument for many years as the cost of higher education escalates even as data shows elite institutions becoming increasingly ideologically monolithic and intolerant of dissent. Whether or not traditional higher education equips graduates for the working world, it doesn’t seem to be preparing them for life in an open and diverse society.

“Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism,” write the University of Toronto’s Milos Brocic and Andrew Miles in a recent paper published in American Sociological Review.

The authors compare the intolerant moral absolutism found among university students to that of “religious and political conservatives” and note:

“Rather than supporting traditional norms, these students emerge from university with a moral profile characterized by high concern for others and weak commitment to traditional social order. One interpretation of these results is that some university students—particularly those majoring in HASS [humanities, arts, and social sciences] or who continue on to graduate education—come to believe that the morals of society must change to remedy historical (and current) injustices (i.e., moral progressivism), but that the moral principles they have learned through their studies represent the real moral truth (moral absolutism).”

In case nobody picked up on the overtones of religious fanaticism, the authors add, “This lends prima facie support to recent claims that the moral relativism of years past is transforming into a form of liberal moral puritanism.”

The perception that too many universities have become de facto ideological monasteries isn’t unique to Brocic and Miles. 

“There is an extremely intense, fundamental social justice religion that’s taking over, not all students, but a very strong [space] of it, at all our colleges and universities,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observed in 2016.

That absolutism and intolerance isn’t unique to higher education or one political faction; liberals have long accused conservatives of leavening their politics with too much theology. Now the phenomenon has spread across the political spectrum.

“American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief,” Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution argued earlier this year in The Atlantic. “Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.”

But universities are supposed to be centers for exploring ideas and expanding knowledge, not for establishing the one, true faith. When their denizens become convinced they’ve found “the real moral truth,” as Brocic and Miles put it, that leaves little room for their original missions, or for dissenters.

“66% of students report some level of acceptance for speaker shout-downs (up 4 percentage points from FIRE’s 2020 report) and 23% consider it acceptable for people to use violence to stop certain speech (up 5 percentage points),” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reported last week of poll results from its 2021 College Free Speech rankings. 

“The research is clear, and our experience working with these schools confirms it: Much of the campus climate for expression is determined by the administration,” commented Sean Stevens, FIRE’s senior research fellow for polling and analytics.

Brocic and Miles agree in part, that “Increasing political homogeneity among faculty and/or administrators could create a sense of moral consensus that leaves shared liberal beliefs unchallenged or might even make them seem naturally true.” But they add that “growth in moral certainty might also be explained by socialization into the official culture of dominant institutions. According to scholarship in this area, universities are the primary institution for mobility into the professional classes. Consequently, their latent function is to socialize students into dominant status culture by teaching proper etiquette, aesthetic tastes, and moral evaluations that serve to legitimize their advantaged class position.” That is, students may mouth “acceptable” opinions and scorn “unacceptable” ideas because they think that’s the way to gain access to good jobs and high social status. That access doesn’t come cheap, either.

“Over the 30 years between 1990-91 and 2020-21, average published tuition and fees increased from $1,810 to $3,770 at public two-year, from 3,800 to $10,560 at public four-year, and from $18,560 to $37,650 at private nonprofit four-year institutions after adjusting for inflation,” according to the College Board.

That paying high prices to learn left-wing liturgy (and when to shame unbelievers) may be less necessary than advertised is demonstrated by the growing ranks of employers dropping requirements for college degrees for new hires. “Penguin Random House human resources director Neil Morrison said that growing evidence shows there is no simple correlation between having a degree and future professional success,” The Guardian reported when the publishing giant changed its criteria for employment in 2016.

Tech companies, in particular, note a mismatch between what colleges offer and what skills they require of their employees. Google even launched a Career Certificates program intended as a substitute for traditional higher education.

“College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn’t need a college diploma to have economic security,” the company noted when it announced the program last year. The certificates are recognized by over 150 employers, including such high-profile companies as T-Mobile and Bayer.

These certificate programs aren’t for everybody, but they’re a viable alternative path to gainful employment and success in life. We’ll need more such alternatives at a time when universities are charging high prices for an “education” in intolerance.

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