Posted on 04/14/2002 3:08:41 AM PDT by sarcasm
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:18 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WHEN the owners of the Bibelot book chain absolutely, positively had to shield $17 million from the Bank of America and the U.S. legal system, they didn't mess around with Bermuda, the Bahamas or Liechtenstein.
They sent the money straight to the Cook Islands, the tightest ship in the "asset protection" business. A gorgeous, palmy archipelago in the boundless blue between Australia and Chile, the Cook Islands cooked up a new set of incorporation and trust laws in the 1980s with the help of a Denver lawyer.
(Excerpt) Read more at sunspot.net ...
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Would that be the same New Zealand that just abolished its Air Force and thinks so little of its Army that it rented 1/3 of it to the film maker of the Lord of Rings? Before you go figgering on screwing over the IRS and putting all your money in a computer on some flyspec in the Pacific, you'd better factor in the chance the US Government will one day offer them them the choice of opening their books, or having a Marine Amphibious Group sail up and do it for them.
Despite opposition within the Bush administration by those who oppose international "tax harmonization" and fear a future world tax agency, in recent months Washington signed tax-data sharing agreements with the Bahamas, the Caymans and Antigua and Barbuda, an island country in the Caribbean.
Ding, ding, ding, ding!
Here is the key sentence. "International tax harmonization" = eventual world taxation via the UN or some other entity. There is more than one agenda at work here.
The short answer: property rights.
There's something about being able to keep the product of one's labor, as opposed to the 13th Amendment that reversed a fundamental tenet of the Constitution. For the first 100 years or so, the federal government raised their small but necessary funds through tariffs, stamps, and sales taxes. Anyone who did not wish to pay ANY taxes was FREE to choose to do so. Liberty, donchyaknow.
Now we have income taxes, a Communist Manifesto-inspired tax structure, a tax enforcement brigade that makes SWAT teams look anemic, a court system that supports the IRS's notion that you are guilty until proven innocent, and a government-as-landlord property rental system replacing land ownership (try not paying your rent, aka property taxes, sometime, and find out who really owns 'your land').
With a sales tax, no matter how high it is set, one can freely choose to never pay. (Essentials are exempted in virtually every plan.)
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