As a taxpayer, I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies. They consume a lot of money, pay themselves extravagant (and tax-free!) salaries, and generally promote statist policies.
The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a prime example. Originally created for benign purposes such as gathering statistics, it now is a bloated bureaucracy pursuing an anti-free market agenda.
But international bureaucracies also have a nasty habit of operating in the shadows and using thuggish behavior to thwart critics. And I have the scars to prove it from my efforts to protect fiscal sovereignty.
- Back in 2001, the OECD threatened to boycott its own global anti-tax competition meeting because one of the low-tax jurisdictions had the nerve to make me an adviser to its delegation.
- In 2008, the OECD threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the “crime” of standing in the public lobby of a hotel and providing advice to representatives of so-called tax havens.
But it’s not just the crowd in Paris that doesn’t believe in openness and fair play. A journalist recently traveled to South Korea to report on a World Health Organization conference on tobacco.
This doesn’t sound like the type of event that would involve skullduggery, but here’s part of what the reporter wrote for the Korea Times.
- Topics:
- Bureaucracy
- secrecy
