The Panama Papers leak reveals global corruption and hypocrisy as the world’s elite have been hiding their wealth to dodge taxes and escape scrutiny. However, the global central banking system is the real culprit.
Another day, another massive breach of the public’s trust by officials. This time, however, the full size and scope of transgressions is truly massive. The fallout from the Panama Papers, a leak of legal documents and financial records, revealing tax evasion and wealth obfuscation by thousands of the world’s elite, has already prompted Iceland’s prime minister to resign.
The shockwaves from this scandal will certainly rattle the global financial industry, and could potentially catapult Bitcoin and other blockchain-based financial technology to the forefront of the new global economy.
The Panama Papers scandal
The leak brings to light the dealings of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which over the past 40 years has sold anonymous shell companies (including false directors) to countless foreign customers seeking to hide their wealth and disassociate it from their name.
The guilty parties implicated by this leak, too numerous to concisely list, include German companies and individuals seeking to evade taxes, a smuggling ring of Vladimir Putin’s closest associates, and offshore sheltering by elites in Iceland and China, two countries with strict capital controls.
In short, the global elite has been revealed to be guilty of hiding their wealth and avoiding taxes. Now, I should point out that while I personally have no problem with keeping your earnings private, and view paying lower taxes to be a rare blessing, the consistency issue remains a troubling one.
At best, the leak reveals hypocrisy from our rulers calling on us to pay our fair share while they refuse to do the same. At worst, it exposes a two-tiered global society where the ruling parasitic class lives off of the rest of us.
The underlying problem in government and central banking
Believe it or not, though, the corruption, hypocrisy, and inequality showcased by the Panama Papers are not the problem, but the symptom. The real issue at hand is a global financial system that benefits the wealthy elite at the expense of the masses. A legal structure that enforces high rates of taxation, while simultaneously providing loopholes for the rich and savvy to exploit, leaves the poor and middle class paying most of the taxes.
Additionally, a central banking system allows rulers to devalue the currency of their people in order to pay national debts, while only they have the means to keep their assets protected offshore. And they get away with it. Even in Iceland where bankers actually do go to jail, the rich still exploit loopholes in the system that they created or championed, and only face repercussions after some serious investigative journalism.
Bitcoin as the solution
No one system will ever be perfect. However, at the very least, cryptocurrency is equalizing. The supply is fixed, and can never be inflated on a whim. The currency is not controlled by any one person or group, and as such cannot be confiscated from citizens’ bank accounts by a government desperate to pay off debts. And finally, even though it is pseudonymous, Bitcoin transactions are all public and accessible to anyone anywhere in the world, meaning no illusion of transparency while sheltering massive amounts of wealth in offshore accounts.
What this means is that Bitcoin would force everyone to play by the same rules, rich and poor alike; and those rules are not crafted by the ruling elite, nor able to be modified them to suit their whims. Cryptocurrency offers a truly equitable monetary system, one that is far more difficult to bend to the whims of whatever crony bureaucrat is seeking to loot the public on that particular day.
The Panama Papers revealed the worst suspicions of a wary public about their rulers, super-rich, and celebrities: corruption, hypocrisy, and duplicity. They will not change their ways for more than a mere moment until public scrutiny passes. A decentralized, cryptocurrency-driven global financial system could very well put this sort of scandal into the dustbin of history.