This New York Times article paints a picture of Wikileaks that I don’t like so much. While I do understand that tax evasion and financial corruption is “truth”, it seems as if the new information supports a way to make sure everyone “pays what they owe” to the State.
Can you provide a link?
I have a link relating to this, but it isn’t from the NYT, it’s from Economic Policy Journal.
I didn’t get the sense that wiki-leaks is promoting government. I got the feel that it was more like this.
If we’re all supposed to, and are forced to, pay taxes, why aren’t they?
Doing away with taxes all together is a separate argument. WikiLeaks doesn’t appear to have any overly leaning political opinion. They are providing press for the masses, providing material the masses would be interested in. This isn’t a flaw of wiki-leaks but of a flaw of modern culture supporting the state.
I think the motive of the leaker is likely to be conflated with the motives of wiki-leaks. The leaker himself may be coming from a statist perspective, i.e., those tax evaders are criminals and must be exposed.
Wikileaks just gives a platform to whistleblowers.
It doesn’t do the whistleblowing himself.
The errant employee on the other hand is a disgrace, and a reminder of the rot in today’s civilization that we can’t keep our secrets, obey the one who pays our paychecks, and have some sense of obliging a commitment that we make when signing our employment contracts. By disclosing the confidential details of holders of bank accounts, he is hurting the future of his fellow colleagues and harassing the customers who pay for his services.
If there’s any penalty in proportion, he should either forfeit his last paycheck or return to work with the employer to make up for what losses he has caused.
On the other hand, banks today also need to keep an internal control system to safeguard their clients against adventurous employees who wish to leak their personal addresses. This kind of information can be used to blackmail people, and the bank can be considered no less complicit due to its negligence.
Yeah, sorry! I just included it in the OP. I was in class trying to pay half attention to this and the lecture, haha.
That’s true. As for your first sentence, I feel that way about illegal immigrants simply because I feel they tend to use the welfare programs when possible much more than the rich do simply because the rich don’t need to use the programs. I guess I just don’t really care if the rich pay more in taxes because they don’t get too much out of social programs, if anything at all.
I’ll wait to see who are the people it exposes. It is one thing to expose tax evasion by eg Silvio Berlusconi or Boris Berezovsky, another to expose an honest businessman, an athlete, an actor (one that does not argue for more government killing in Darfur) or some such.
Recall that Rothbard was not against the McCarthy witch-hunt as long as it went after government officials only. If there is some good guy it rats on however there will be no excuse.
Yes much better stated. Thanks.
All is clear now.
WikiLeaks has a strange policy in place. In the past they were given a list of thousands of British National Party “covert members” who turned out to be police officers. These officers could have been disciplined or even fired because they aren’t allowed to be members of any “extremist” organization so WikiLeaks decided not to publish the list. They justified it by saying they don’t want to harm the “small guys”. I personally saw this as a shrewd political move to win the sympathy of the public. What’s the difference here? Only the numbers of zeroes in bank accounts I say. Both the police officers and these bank account owners have violated laws. Both have committed victimless crimes in doing so: nobody was hurt and no property was damaged. And both have been used to win over the sympathy of the public. People are brainwashed into thinking that if every single penny of due taxes isn’t collected it hurts everybody. They think taxes are high because somebody isn’t paying. Most of them don’t have any entreprenurial experience: they struggle to understand the fact if the owner of small activity pays everything he is asked of (like most do) he ends up earning less money than a waiter or a low-skill factory worker. They think we are all swimming in gold and we are hiding the money, just like the Jews of yore were suspected of starving Christianity by hoarding gold out of sheer greed. Most of the rhetorics used today against “tax dodgers” sounds very similar to what Martin Luther said against Jews. By appealing to this widespread sentiment WikiLeaks will score so many more points in the public opinion.
Ironically if Swiss bank secrecy were still as good as it was back in the '70s Wikileaks’s own accounts would be much safer…