To put it in one sentence: What makes you so sure that the money is better, in terms of good to humanity*, in the hands of governments of countries like Haiti than in the bank accounts of multinational corporations?

When you say “corporations [should] pay the tax they owe”, have you considered that in some cases this might actually be the more harmful course of action - for instance if the Government who receives the tax money is going to spend it on arms**.

Not that I’m saying your necessarily wrong about all of this and that corporations are not up to no good a lot of the time - just looking for a bit of balance. My argument appears dogmatically based because I’m trying to provide the yin to your yang, as it were.

* Leaving aside the argument regarding avoidance/evasion etc
** Lets not get into the morality of the arms trade; that’s a quite separate issue.

You assume I am opposed to capitalism. I am a chartered accountant. I have run ten companies. It’s an odd assumption for you to make.

I am opposed to corruption. Tax havens anable corruption by providing the secrecy that veils it.

Of course there are other forms of corruption, bit contrast with old communist regimes is pretty irrelevant: mass abuse of populations knows no political divide.

I am not asking for nationalisation: I am asking that leaders do not steal from their states, major corporations do not assist them to do so, and that corporations pay the tax they owe. That’s about ethical government, politics and business. If you don’t agree with those things what are you for?

Of course it will never happen, entirely. But we can eliminate the corruption that tax havens deliberately facilitate and we can eliminate the corrupt banks, lawyers and accountants of this world who use those places.

I live in the world of pragmatic possibility. Your dogmatically based argument has no place there.

Richard

Alright. Where would these people be if there was no capitalism? If there were no corporations and no banks and no tax avoidance because there wasn’t any wealth being generated that you could then demand be given over to Governments across the world in the form of tax?

Can you seriously argue that there wouldn’t be extreme poverty in areas of the world such as Haiti, where (as you correctly point out) corruption and incompetence have led to utter failure to develop, were capitalism to be neutered?

No, the result would be that instead of some people being very poor and other people being very rich, EVERYONE WOULD BE VERY POOR. All of your political arguments seem to me to be based in some way on this faulty assumption.

You say that poverty in Haiti is (at least partly - you are not clear) the result of political corruption, and that said political corruption could not happen without tax havens. Do you blame tax havens for the ‘political corruption’ that led to the starvation of over 10 million people in China between 1958-1961? I would hope not.

My first problem with what you propose is that you assume that the profits of the corporations you attack necessarily belong to “the poorest people in the world”, by proxy of the states. There is no economic justification for stating this. It is not as though if it weren’t for the wealth of said corporations these people would be richer - EVERYONE WOULD BE POOR! The alternative isn’t some sort of equality utopia!

My second problem is your suggestion, and that of the Guardian article you link to, that were the money to be given to states rather than stashed in tax havens, said money would somehow fall into the hands of the peoples of countries like Haiti, rather than gobbled up by corrupt Governments. The reverse has been observed over and over again in developing countries. How much of the money will actually go to “benefit[ing] the poorest people in the world” and how much to building the umpteenth lavish palace? Modern-day case in point: Zimbabwe.

Maybe I haven’t represented all your points as you would wish in this response - but that is how posts like this come across.