Offshore cash and responsibility

We are implicitly part of family, nation and history, which have a right to be defended in themselves because they are what life is made from – life is not made from abstractions, however worthy they sound

Probably, if you were forced to think about the matter, you would defend your lifestyles – working in a foreign country or living there, investing and banking offshore, looking for the best investments – by referring to freedom. Why shouldn’t you be free to live and work where you like, and to earn and invest to provide for yourselves and your families?

The freedom argument is always contrasted with the equality argument. A philosopher called John Rawls put it like this: suppose you wake up on a desert island with a bunch of other people and there was a pile of goods to distribute. You are allowed to vote for one of a number of different distributions, most of which would produce unequal outcomes (maybe the goods are distributed according to who is tallest, or best-looking, or had the right parents – you get the picture). Given that you won’t know what you’ll get until the eventual distribution has taken place, wouldn’t it be rational for you to vote either for an absolutely equal distribution or for any subsequent distribution by the state to be made to benefit the worst-off because they’ve done badly out of the first distribution?

Apologies for that foray into political philosophy, but that argument I’ve just sketched has been massively influential (it’s in Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice). Is there anything wrong with the argument? Well yes, lots. I won’t bore you with the full range of the debate because it has been huge (but for the main response to it try a book called Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick).

Suffice to say, the main response has been to stress the extent to which centralised distributions, based on equality of outcome, violate a certain idea of freedom, which is where I began. We just do not ‘wake up’ on a desert island. We are implicitly part of family, nation and history, which have a right to be defended in themselves because they are what life is made from – life is not made from abstractions, however worthy they sound.

Be that as it may, with freedom comes responsibility. Even Rawls’s ‘desert island’ community would have to depend on people automatically doing the right thing, without having to be compelled to do it (although some critics say that that is just what would have to happen for his desert island utopia to work, but never mind). In the news section, for instance, we report on a form of charitable giving that allows the gift to be maximally tax-efficient for the charity concerned – but also for the donor. That seems to me a good paradigm of how responsible individuals should behave economically and socially. It is a good mixture of community concern and self-interest – both of which bypass the often dead hand of government.

Free and responsible individuals: not robber barons on the one hand or resentful state-dependees on the other. How’s that for a utopia, if we could ever get there? The lives that expats live can approach that virtuous balance if they take the right steps. Take them.