I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies. Regular readers know that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is the worst institution from my perspective, followed by the International Monetary Fund. Some folks ask why the United Nations isn’t higher on the list? My answer is simple. The UN has a very statist orientation and it routinely […]

This article appeared in Cayman Financial Review.

It’s a bad idea when governments demand information on your bank accounts and investments so they can impose economically destructive double taxation. It’s a worse idea when they also demand the right to tax economic activity in other jurisdictions (otherwise known as “worldwide taxation“). And it’s the worst possible development when governments decide that they should impose […]

I’ve argued repeatedly that efforts like FATCA and the OECD’s Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters pose a substantial threat to financial and taxpayer privacy. In an excellent commentary at The Daily Signal today, David Burton outlined how the OECD’s proposed standard to grant automatic government access to private taxpayer information leaves […]

“This is just more of the same from the unelected bureaucrats at the OECD. International tax collectors are determined to abolish tax competition by any means possible.”

The worst part of the tax code is something most Americans have likely never heard of.

Senator Rand Paul is being criticized and condemned by the Washington establishment. That’s almost certainly a sign that he’s doing the right thing. And given the recent events in Russia and Ukraine, we should say he’s doing a great thing. This is because Senator Paul is waging a lonely battle to stop the unthinking and […]

Time for another great moment in red tape. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that banks treat customers poorly in part because of bad laws and regulations from Washington. Money laundering laws were adopted beginning about 30 years ago based on the theory that we could lower crime rates by making it more difficult for crooks […]

One of the many differences between advocates of freedom and supporters of statism is how they view “rights.” Libertarians, along with many conservatives, believe in the right to be left alone and not molested by government. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as “negative liberty,” which is just another way of saying “the absence […]

People are getting increasingly agitated about being spied on by government. The snoops at the National Security Agency have gotten the most attention, and those bureaucrats are in the challenging position of trying to justify massive invasions of our privacy when they can’t show any evidence that this voyeurism has stopped a single terrorist attack. And let’s […]