You have to analyse at the population here; capital controls are useful for preventing people who have accumulated sizeable asset holdings in country X from moving them to a jurisdiction Y where there are effectively no taxes. Of course this reduces the freedom of the people who control these assets, but there is a common fallacy (usually introduced by the very same people) where they claim that liberty (in the abstract, without the very important qualification that this is _their_ liberty) is being surpressed while not noting the very important fact that _they are the most powerful members of society_ and that preventing them from moving their assets means that a whole lot of good (social welfare) cna be done for other people, without substantially impacting the material qualiy of their lives (the wealth/"improves my life" is pretty logarithmic IME, e.g. moving from 20,000 EUR -> 30,000 EUR of income a year makes a huge difference, moving from 30,000 EUR -> 130,000 EUR still makes a big difference, but 130,000 EUR -> 1 million EUR probably does not bring a concomitant increase in happiness).
I think this quote from Paulo Freire is pertinent
> The former oppressors do not feel liberated [once the people with less power than them are given more]. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor travelled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights – although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, 'human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are 'things'.
> The tax-man and the police state are the oppressors
The oppressors _of whom_? For example taxing billionaires is not "oppression". I completely agree that modern tax policy is much too burdensome on relatively poor individuals in comparison to relatively wealthy ones (certainly given the amount of money spent on policing petty crime compared to catching large-scale tax evasion), but that isn't to say we shouldn't have taxes!
Taxes aren’t an inherent ethical imperative, and certainly not something for which we should accept endless government intrusion in service of the collection thereof.
Taxes are an imperfect mechanism for funding an imperfect state, not an innate moral right to spend the fruits of others’ labor.
You said this before but which taxed people and which prosecuted are you thinking of?
> Taxes aren’t an inherent ethical imperative
Even if this is not true, there are certainly a number of pragmatic reasons to support them (it turns out it's much nicer to live somewhere where there is a fair and just judicial system, a functioning education system, roads/bridges/etc, internet, clean water, sewage systems and social protection for the less fortunate and well off).
taxation is not oppression, it is the means of seeking to fund the government. Taxation is applied in almost every EU nation on a sliding scale that almost entirely ensures that it is evenly applied to every single citizen. I would argue that formulating this scenario as "oppression" demonstrates that you do not accept the democratic mandate of government and view government as an enemy which you should hide your earnings from.
The same argument of diminishing returns, that quality of life doesn't improve much when going from 130k€ to 1M€ can be applied to capital controls. Is this 10k€ limit really what is needed to save the welfare state? Were the previous controls not enough?
Or is it that the welfare state is collapsing on its own and grasping at straws?
> Or is it that the welfare state is collapsing on its own and grasping at straws?
I think you just reached the conclusion? These things never worked (look at history), but usually are implemented by the incompetent (which got us here in the first place).
This definitely makes sense, but my initial gut reaction of not liking this is still strong. I just don't trust that this will be used to meaningful ways.
I also imagine the people that may be most likely to take their capital to another country aren't worried about capital controls like this. Surely they have much better ways of transferring their wealth than 10K cash payments at a time, but I'm not rich enough to know for sure.
> I also imagine the people that may be most likely to take their capital to another country aren't worried about capital controls like this. Surely they have much better ways of transferring their wealth than 10K cash payments at a time, but I'm not rich enough to know for sure.
Yes of course, this is just an argument about capital controls in general (the really problematic cases are people who own a lot of capital, e.g. factories, power plants, internet businesses, etc. moving it around, which they definitely don't do with cash!)
I would characterise it differently. The aspect of financial repression that hurts the middle classes the most is letting inflation run. This is because they tend to have cash assets and their way of life is in many ways predicated on the idea that working hard ensures a certain buying capacity. It is also hard for them to move to Panama, for many obvious reasons. It is more that in the current world, there are many options for moving money around, so it harder for a government to ensure they have a captive audience for financial repression in terms of cash reserves.
I am not critiquing financial repression. It is probably the only feasible way to reduce government debt compared to say austerity measures. We would all be better off if economic growth could overcome government debt, but the Eurozone lacks the demographics to make this happen. Italy in particular is a basket case in that regard. One point to make however, is that the severe degree of inflation in Europe seems at least partly due to asinine energy policy. If that had been better handled, then the pain wouldn't be so great. Europeans may therefore be less happy to accept inflation denuding their lifestyles as an 'inevitable' condition of living in social welfare states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression