Capitalism needs a major adjustment or perhaps replacement with a humane and just form of economy. Really, for the vast majority of people in the world, it works against them. The lie that good quality of life is dependent on the survival of capitalism is a lie capitalists tell over and over again to justify a system that puts most of the world’s wealth in the hands of a very few and, with the outrageous amounts of money these people own, they acquire the rest of us.
We are bought and sold and trained to like it, bought off with a little that is allowed to trickle down.
The leak, called the Paradise Papers, centers on an offshore law firm that has helped obscure the wealth of multinational companies and the superrich.
From the Paradise Papers
II. Tax Base Erosion. Another key implication of this study is that the impact on lost tax revenue implied by our estimates may be huge SS large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of nations, especially to developing countries that are now struggling to replace lost aid dollars and pay for climate change.
© James S. Henry, TJN 2012
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Assuming, conservatively, that global offshore financial wealth of $21 trillion earns a total return of just 3 percent a year, and would have faced an average marginal tax rate of 30 percent in the home country, this unrecorded wealth might have generated tax revenues of $189 billion per year more than twice the $86 billion that OECD countries as a whole are now spending on all overseas development assistance.
One reply on “And so it is called free enterprise but it is really a system in which those who do not have pay dearly for what others do have”
“[American capitalism] trusts to the free initiative of individuals, and proclaims, if not abolition, the reduction of government. However, as it respects private property, and is founded on the principle of each for himself, and therefore on competition, its liberty is only the liberty of the strong, the license of those who have, to oppress and exploit the weak who have nothing”–Errico Malatesta, from “Anarchy”