Is Wikileaks About to Rat Tax Evaders Out to the State?

What Is The WikiLeaks Ideology?
by Taylor Conant, EconomicPolicyJournal.com
Jan. 18, 2011

I sincerely hope this is not the case, but if Wikileaks is going to reduce themselves to the role of being a snitch for the government against people evading state criminality, they're a freaking joke.

This is the problem with the phony "liberal" brand of statism. If you're a state supremacist, with no recognition of the inherent evil of statism, you start to think exposing "tax evaders" is doing some sort of public good because the money can't be stolen by the government and spent on killing people.

What are they going to leak next, how so and so pleb is cheating on their wife?

Secrecy isn't the problem, state secrecy is the problem, I hope they're not so foolish as to not realize that. - Chris

P.S. The idea Swiss banks are secret is a total myth. Swiss banks were secret for some short time period in the past, these days they're the same as everywhere else, same goes for Uruguay, the Cayman Islands, etc.

The only secret banks AFAIK are in China and some of these developing countries who don't give a damn about complying with US laws. [...] Here is a short list of stand-out themes conveyed in the press conference that raised red flags for me:

Swiss banking secrecy must end (this was a point-blank, unconditional statement made by one of the various handlers during the press conference)

Western government public welfare systems are threatened by tax evasion enabled by bank secrecy; people ask "where is the money?" for these programs and the answer is the wealth has moved offshore to bank secrecy havens (this is a decidedly pro-welfare, statist reason for attacking bank secrecy)

All wealth the State has arrogated to itself via tax laws rightfully belongs to the State; bank secrecy allows Swiss banks and other 3rd party regional jurisdictions to set Western government tax rates, an unacceptable circumstance (bank secrecy has no place in open, transparent and progressive democratic systems because it allows for concentrated wealth to be passed down through families by avoiding schemes like the inheritance tax)

Regulators and legal authorities in the past have not been accommodative when accusations of criminal wrong-doing have been brought to them in the past, but the specific information contained in these leaks -- bank Julius Baer -- will be delivered to "competent legal authorities" for them to decide how to handle it, rather than made public (an obvious and inexplicable contradiction)

Journalists can not be trusted to serve the public interest because they are often pressured and compromised by those perpetrating anti-social schemes to serve as accomplices, knowingly or unknowingly; we will use the mainstream press as our partners in leaking this information (another obvious and inexplicable contradiction)

Today, money and capital are international, which means they can flee the tax regimes of their host States at whim-- this is a social bad (another of the handlers implied that international capital mobility was problematic for Western welfare States, where "any currency can be exchanged into any other" and the world financial system was "truly fluid" and interconnected, allowing people to move and hide their wealth beyond the reach of grasping local politicians)

WikiLeaks is sounding less and less like a freedom-oriented outfit and more and more like a bunch of well-intentioned but ultimately gullible and therefore dangerous statist dupes. [...]

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