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UK Pursues Tax Evaders Using Stolen Bank Details
Andrew Smith writes "The UK taxman (HM Revenue & Customs) is reportedly using a stolen list of bank details to pursue wealthy individuals with off-shore accounts. The list was stolen by an employee of HSBC, and gave details of the bank's customers with money in Swiss accounts. The bank employee fled to France, and the authorities there passed the details on to the UK tax collection agency."
Actually, if you understood the theory behind money and had some knowledge of economic history, you'd know that governments have zero control over money. There have been plenty of instances where the citizens of a country refused to use the governments official currency and either used the currency of another country or used things such as cigarettes instead. Money only has the value that people decide it has.
But they do enough good to make it worth it.
That's extremely debatable, especially since pretty much every government these days are on the fast track to being an Orwellian style police state. I don't think I've read a single news article about a country gaining more freedoms (well, outside of Cuba allowing cell phones now), yet there's countless ones from every "free" country about people losing their rights.
That's why all first world countries with high standards of living have large governments that collect taxes
They may currently, but they didn't always. For a long time the US had both the highest standard of living AND the lowest taxes and smallest government. It's actually been proven several times throughout history that higher taxes and bigger government almost always leads to lower quality of life (there have been the rare exceptions, such as Sweden, but even Sweden is changing now and shrinking the government and lowering taxes).
So no they are not trying to keep their hard earned money, they are stealing from everyone else.
*sigh* You're one of those people who don't understand property rights. You do NOT have the right to someone else's money. It doesn't matter if a politician passes a law saying it's ok for person X to steal a certain amount from person Y because person Y makes more money - it's still person Y's money and no one else has the right to it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Thank you for your morality lessons. What would we have done without them? We would just not be paying taxes as we wouldn't have thought of all that. Thank you again.
However, the morality of the tax avoidance was not the issue here.
The issue here was the goverment was using a stolen list. The bad morality of the tax avoidance is a given. Let's say it wasn't a list, but the goverment got the details by torture. That would clearly cross a line. Back to the list. What crosses the line?