Nicholas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University in New York on Monday and, as he has done before, demonstrated that everyone who calls themselves a conservative is not a free marketer.   The French President pressed for an expansion of global financial bureaucracies and blasted the right of individual countries to be fiscally sovereign.  The following Associated […]

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video examines anti-money laundering laws and finds that they are expensive and intrusive. These costs might be acceptable if the result was less crime, but this mini-documentary reveals that anti-money laundering policies are ineffective. As a former Reagan Administration official remarked, they undermine the fight against crime by misallocating law enforcement resources.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation will co-host a conference on tax competition and financial privacy on October 20, 2009 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. The conference is aimed at educating the public policy community on issues such as tax competition, financial privacy, fiscal sovereignty and corporate taxation.

Last week’s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Global Tax Forum featured an unusual beginning as a looming hurricane in the Pacific forced the event from Cabo to Mexico City. This created special challenges for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity delegation since the government did not put jets at our disposal for the last-minute trip, as they did for official delegates. But we persevered and made our way to the Mexican capital.

The past several months have witnessed an unfortunate setback in the fight for good tax policy. Bolstered by a shift in the U.S. position from benign neglect to active support, anti-tax competition ideologues have won a somewhat significant victory. Low-tax jurisdictions, faced with direct and indirect threats of sanctions from powerful nations, have been forced to weaken their human-rights policies by agreeing that privacy laws no longer protect foreign investors. Indeed, jurisdictions are being coerced to sign agreements to provide confidential data upon request to at least 12 of their high-tax brethren.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CF&P) announced today it will be in Los Cabos, Mexico, next week to help educate delegates at the OECD’s Global Tax Forum about the benefits of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy.

Politicians who like higher taxes would like to shut down so-called tax havens so they can set up an “OPEC for politicians” and implement higher tax rates. Yet since all the evidence shows that low-tax jurisdictions are very beneficial for the global economy, the politicians often resort to dishonest demagoguery. This educational video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity debunks President Obama’s two most common smears against tax havens.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has put together another rigged hearing to demonize low-tax jurisdictions. Entitled “Tax Haven Banks and U.S. Compliance – Obtaining the Names of U.S. Clients with Swiss Accounts,” the latest hearing is part of a broader campaign to pressure Switzerland to weaken its human-rights protections of financial privacy. The staged hearing comes on the heels of the Justice Department’s unprecedented demand that the Swiss bank UBS turn over 52,000 names and accounts of American investors – even though the United States and Switzerland already have treaties that govern the sharing of information in cases of matters such as tax fraud.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation has produced videos showing the economic and moral benefits of so-called tax havens. This final video in the three-part series addresses some of the most common myths put forth by politicians from high-tax nations. Using academic research and data from international organizations, the video shows that the most common attacks made against low-tax jurisdictions are empty demagoguery.

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation video demonstrates that low-tax jurisdictions offer millions of people around the world a safe haven from tyrannical and oppressive government. For this, and many other reasons, there is a powerful moral case for preserving and promoting tax havens.