I wish the title of this blog post referred to the President of the United States, but instead our praise is directed across the Atlantic, to the President of the Czech Republic, who wisely has warned against giving “global governance” powers to the international bureaucrats at the United Nations.
President Vaclav Klaus is a great man, who has battled against immense odds to preserve national sovereignty, resisting statist initiatives such as the new EU Constitution (aka, the Lisbon Treaty) and global warming schemes. Klaus understands that international bureaucracies are staffed by leftist ideologues who reflexively distrust markets. Equally important, he recognizes that governments will use “global governance” as a scheme to create tax and regulatory cartels that inevitably expand the burden of government and reduce competition among nations.
Here’s a Reuters report on the strong speech Klaus gave to the kleptocrats at the United Nations.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Saturday criticized U.N. calls for increased “global governance” of the world’s economy, saying the world body should leave that role to national governments.
The solution to dealing with the global economic crisis, Klaus told the U.N. General Assembly, did not lie in “creating new governmental and supranational agencies, or in aiming at global governance of the world economy.”
“On the contrary, this is the time for international organizations, including the United Nations, to reduce their expenditures, make their administrations thinner, and leave the solutions to the governments of member states,” he said.
…Klaus, a free-market economist who oversaw a wave of privatization in the 1990s after communism collapsed in his homeland, also said the world was “moving in the wrong direction” in combating the economic crisis.
“The anti-crisis measures that have been proposed and already partly implemented follow from the assumption that the crisis was a failure of markets and that the right way out is more regulation of markets,” he said.
Klaus said that was a “mistaken assumption” and it was impossible to prevent future crises through regulatory interventions and similar actions by governments.
That will only “destroy the markets and together with them the chances for economic growth and prosperity in both developed and developing countries,” he said.
A couple of years ago, I had the honor of introducing Klaus at a conference in France. Very rarely do I meet a politician that exudes philosophical integrity. Klaus was one of those unusual cases. And if you want to know why it is important to preserve jurisdictional competition, here is a video on the specific issue of tax competition. This is rather timely since I leave tomorrow for Singapore, where I will be doing everything I can to undermine the pampered bureaucrats at the OECD and their sinister plans to create a global tax cartel to prop up Europe’s inefficient welfare states.
