At the G-8 meeting, perhaps when Obama wasn’t busy condemning Christian parochial schools as ‘encouraging division’ (but he’d never condemn Islamic ones, oh no!), the attendees came up with the Lough Erne Declaration.

It promises powerful action against the terrible ‘scourge’ of tax evasion:

1. Tax authorities across the world should automatically share information to fight the scourge of tax evasion.
…
4. Developing countries [ed: like Greece, maybe?] should have the information and capacity to collect the taxes owed them – and other countries have a duty to help them.

Now, I’m all in favor of obeying tax law (and I do), and ending ‘free rides’. But isn’t it interesting that the alleged scourge (number one!) is G-8 governments feeling they don’t get enough from their people?

It would never be that governments spend too much – on promises they can’t deliver. Never that governments fail to live within their means. Never that they’re grinding their productive people to death with regulations and mandates.

Never, ever that governments are trying to collect too much tax, which kills the economy and which people are morally right to dislike and, to some extent, resist.

Remember, when you earn money, it’s your money. Or it should be. It only exists (for government to tax) because you took the initiative to earn it. You can prove it easily, by just not earning. Quit your job and live off the dole – as many people do.

Greedy governments drive their citizens into off-tax activity by claiming too much of what citizens earn. That’s the real scourge.

And what the G-8 really promise, in the quote above, is to share their surveillance of you – the better to fleece us all. Big Brother just got a little bigger. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find out in the next Obamascandal that the NSA and IRS share surveillance information – about everyone, and with foreign governments as well as each other.

Via Zero Hedge.

UPDATE: Don’t think government is greedy? Think again. Merely by cutting his $100 million Africa travel budget by a few million, Obama could have restored White House tours.

From the comments: As Jane Austen puts it:

It only took a century for our country to get from no federal income tax to a place where it is considered the government’s right to extract as much personal income as they possibly can from those who earn it…

Now here we are…organizations like ICIJ claim to protect “integrity” by exposing tax evaders, as if it is not their money and governments have a right to confiscate large portions of private citizens’ incomes.

Something has gone seriously wrong.