Few people bother to work out what actually happens in a Finance  Centre, preferring to baulk at narcissistic journalistic drivel about tax evasion. Few people go further and question the absolute hypotheses upon which such journalism has thrived.

To understand what really happens in a Finance Centre, start with this link to http://www.jerseyfinance.je/moving-money

and then download the Paper by Andrew Morriss and Richard Gordon, who used to work for the International Monetary Fund where he was Senior Counsel and Senior Financial Sector Expert, and where he worked on taxation, debt restructuring, and financial integrity.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2348144

Once the refererence to a scale between policy extremes is understood and established, the reader can then place their own views between State Monetary Control and Individual Freedom on it, and work out whether their employment or activity is at stake.  It's your money, not just "theirs", or is it?

The underlying issue is that the Central Bank in each jurisdiction has to have assets and income flows against which to issue the necessary monetary credit to its first tier banks in order to issue its domestic currency. The distinction between that and fiscal policy is frequently blurred by journalists, and that buck is inevitably and conveniently passed to the school of phantom tax avoiders whose putative existence "explains" the anomalies of tax gaps between the entirely separate tax collection mechanism and  the differing monetary ideals separating those of the open market and of the closed supposedly "redistributive" financial systems.

Quite what there is to "redistribute" is another question when seen in the context of a fiat monetary system such as that current in the United Kingdom.  Sterling is no longer issued against repayment in precious metal in a wheelbarrow.

If the assumption is that a Central Bank issues loans to banks that in turn create "money" against a state's assets, liabilities and future earnings, all that there is to redistribute out of tax is a claim on one's own or rather on someone else's earnings. The United Kingdom has still to pay off its national debt after the First World War, let alone subsequent conflicts and current social liabilities.  Most Labour 'redistribution' policies appear to be based on a false definition of what 'money' actually is. That is of no surprise, as the policy adopted under the initial British welfare state, in 1942, has failed to take into account the post-war development  of money as an international means of payment rather than a domestic indicator of 'wealth'. That development could only have taken place through offshore centres through which exporting industrials and businesses could function, in the unsettled post-war period, and make and receive payments on a neutral legal and adminstrative platform. Hence the positioning of legal claims as described in the Jersey Finance Moving Money page. Difficult to "redistribute" that process, even with an FTT, is it not? The FTT will not work, as it is not a compensating payment to counteract the international capital flows which caused the 2004 crisis: Chinese and German budget surpluses looking for a home abroad.

Luxemburg surrendered its steel industry to the ECSC in exchange for the right to create its banking and financial centre, which is now being removed from it by the states which benefited from the Coal and Steel Community, namely France, Germany and Italy.

In that more realistic scenario, it is no surprise that taxation takes up a significant part of the debate on "well-being", without the full picture being provided by agitprop.

No one is construing tax evasion as being in any way "legal" commendable or desirable.  The issue is not there, but elsewhere.  The laws comprising the tax collection mechanism have yet to be equated with monetary policy ideals other than that of a free market. An example?

France has a GDP produced as to over 56% by the state. The PPP figures are not available. Where lies the possibility for growth in that area of the economy, when the high value added elements that dominate the remaining 44%, which includes the so-called 'productive' associative NGO sector, are unable to compete without lowering wages, and the SMEs that have survived have had to cope with a fiscal system, of which the social security element is based on turnover, and whose rates assume that they are underdeclaring?

Perhaps marxist economic theory was published too early to integrate the current financial system into its thesis. Current Labour policy certainly has not and remains in the vaguely Luddite tendency of the diminishing unskilled workforce which has facilitated its economic survival as a party. Hence the duality between the financial policies actually pursued by their governments and their overt political stances.

However, given the current tension between the USA, which issues the main international currency the Dollar in its legal grip, and China, Russia and Germany, all of which have been buying gold, there may well be a sea-change in the international currency markets were the Dollar to become a less attractive medium of exchange, despite the magnetic effect of its balance of payments deficit coupled to the currency.  The anarchic inflow of foreign capital into investmenst which could not be "repaid" was the cause of the 2007 crisis.

Answers will be gratefully received. But probably not in this fiscal lifetime....