{"id":5798,"date":"2015-02-17T06:39:52","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T11:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5798"},"modified":"2015-02-17T06:39:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T11:39:52","slug":"taxes-and-corruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5798","title":{"rendered":"Taxes and corruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 id=\"post-4426\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com\/2015\/02\/17\/taxes-and-corruption\/\" target=\"_blank\">Taxes and corruption<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>It seems that the rumbling story about HSBC\u2019s Swiss branch has achieved what political pollsters know as \u201ccut through\u201d \u2013 meaning that it\u2019s of interest to voters as well as to those reporters who are sentenced to watch Prime Minister\u2019s Questions each week.<\/p>\n<p>The story reminded me of a passage in Wolfgang Streeck\u2019s 2014 article \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/newleftreview.org\/II\/87\/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end\" target=\"_blank\">How Will Capitalism End<\/a>?\u2019 in which he explores the drivers of change that could bring about, well, the end of capitalism. The article deserves more space here on another occasion, but for the moment I just wanted to quote what he writes about his fifth driver, corruption:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Finance is an \u2018industry\u2019 where innovation is hard to distinguish from rule-bending or rule-breaking; where the payoffs from semi-legal and illegal activities are particularly high; where the gradient in expertise and pay between firms and regulatory authorities is extreme; where revolving doors between the two offer unending possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle corruption; where the largest firms are not just too big to fail, but also too big to jail, given their importance for national economic policy and tax revenue; and where the borderline between private companies and the state is more blurred than anywhere else, as indicated by the 2008 bailout or by the huge number of former and future employees of financial firms in the American government.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So far, fairly familiar, if admirably concise. The more important element here is that what this has done is broken the moral story about capitalism \u2013\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism\" target=\"_blank\">work and the Protestant ethic<\/a>\u00a0and all that \u2013 that writers such as Max Weber spent so long trying to assemble at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Taxes and corruption It seems that the rumbling story about HSBC\u2019s Swiss branch has achieved what political pollsters know as \u201ccut through\u201d \u2013 meaning that it\u2019s of interest to voters as well as to those reporters who are sentenced to watch Prime Minister\u2019s Questions each week. The story reminded me of a passage in Wolfgang [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,1769,3372,537,775,3618,783],"class_list":["post-5798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-corruption","tag-hsbc","tag-money-laundering","tag-switzerland","tag-tax-avoidance","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5799,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5798\/revisions\/5799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}