If you live in Illinois or California and you’re sick and tired of high taxes and crummy government, should you have the freedom to move to a state with no income tax, such as Florida or Texas?
The answer is yes (though Walter Williams joked that leftist politicians may start putting up barbed wire fences and watch towers to keep taxpayers imprisoned).
What about if you want to move from one country to another? I’ve written many times that people should have the liberty to leave a country 
(including the United States) that mistreats them.
But let’s look at the issue from a different perspective.
What about the nations that explicitly seek to attract new residents? Especially new residents that can help boost the economy with new jobs and investment?
The United States uses the EB-5 visa to attract this type of immigrant, and many other nations have similar programs.
Needless to say, politicians from uncompetitive, high-tax nations don’t like this competition for entrepreneurial talent. And neither do politicians from poorly governed nations in the developing world.
They know they’ll suffer a “brain drain” if their most productive citizens can freely move to nations with better governance.
Needless to say, they should fix their bad policies if they’re worried about people leaving.
But instead they’ve decided to attack the countries that roll out the red carpet for newcomers. And they have convinced the statists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to create a blacklist of nations with attractive “citizenship by investment” and “residence by investment” programs.
Here’s the list of countries that the OECD is condemning.
The bureaucrats at the OECD receive tax-free salaries, so it’s especially galling that one of the conditions for being on this new blacklist is if a nation offers a “low personal income tax rate.”
You may think I’m joking, but that condition is explicitly stated on the OECD site.
And the U.K.-based Guardian says something similar in its report on the OECD’s latest effort to rig global rules so governments can grab more money.
A blacklist of 21 countries whose so-called “golden passport” schemes threaten international efforts to combat tax evasion has been published by…the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based body has raised the alarm about the fast-expanding $3bn (£2.3bn) citizenship by investment industry,
which has turned nationality into a marketable commodity. …foreign nationals can become citizens of countries in which they have never lived. …concern is growing among political leaders, law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the schemes are open to abuse… After analysing residence and citizenship schemes operated by 100 countries, the OECD says it is naming those jurisdictions that attract investors by offering low personal tax rates on income from foreign financial assets, while also not requiring an individual to spend a significant amount of time in the country. …The OECD believes the ease with which the wealthiest individuals can obtain another nationality is undermining information sharing. If a UK national declares themselves as Cypriot, for example, information about their offshore bank accounts could be shared with Cyprus instead of Britain’s HM Revenue and Customs.
This blacklist is very similar to the OECD’s attack against so-called tax havens, which started about 20 years ago.
Only that time, the OECD was trying to help high-tax nations that were suffering from an exodus of capital. Now the goal is to prevent an exodus of labor.
By the way, the OECD exempted its own member nations when it launched its attack against tax havens.
So you won’t be surprised to learn that the OECD also didn’t blacklist any of its many member nations that have CBI and RBI programs. And it also let some other nations off the hook as well.
In other words, the OECD is advancing statism and being hypocritical at the same time.
For those of us who closely follow this bureaucracy, this hack behavior is very familiar. For instance, it has used dodgy, dishonest, and misleading data when pushing big-government policies regarding poverty, pay equity, inequality, and comparative economics.
So this new blacklist is simply one more reason why I’m a big advocate of cutting off the flow of American tax dollars to this parasitical bureaucracy.
P.S. To give you an idea why high-tax nations want to choke off migration of taxpayers, check out this poll showing that 52 percent of French citizens would be interested in moving to America.
