The UK-based Observer reports that Norway’s socialist government is leading a new campaign against low-tax jurisdiction.

The premises are absurd, including the assumption that developing nations will prosper if they get more tax revenue. Moreover, the entire scheme is based on some very dubious “facts,” none of which are substantiated. Most importantly, the article fails to note the many benefits of tax competition, including better tax policy and the protection of human rights:

Plans have been drawn up for an international taskforce to crack down on tax haven abuses orchestrated in large part by bankers, accountants and lawyers in London. As authoritative evidence suggests that $1 trillion of illicit funds flow to secretive havens managed by financiers based in London, New York and Dubai, the Norwegian government is forming a global coalition to ‘facilitate the recovery of assets illicitly stacked away in tax havens’. Several countries are set to join, but Britain, recently classed as an offshore financial centre by the International Monetary Fund, is not among them.

…The imminent formation of an international tax haven taskforce comes as the World Bank, headed by Robert Zoellick, is coming under pressure to establish its first forensic study into the illicit cash flowing out of developing nations. …Exactly 10 times the $100bn spent on aid and debt write-offs by rich countries is siphoned out of developing countries, with corporations responsible for 60 per cent of that figure through a web of trusts, nominee accounts and the flagrant mispricing of goods to escape tax.

…Cracking down on tax havens and the evasion of taxes by some of the world’s biggest companies is seen as the ‘missing link’ in the poverty alleviation agenda. Investigators and lawyers at a conference on the Movement of Illicit Funds in Washington last Thursday confirmed it was corporations and not corrupt politicians in the developing world that accounted for most tax evasion.