Apres moi la deluge

 Tobin Tax

A Delphi organized in San Francisco in 1995 by the Gorbachev Foundation, showed how much the great decision-makers worry about assuring their control over the "working masses" through consumption. The assembly of the five hundred globally-most-famous people in politics and business proposed to "show the way towards a new civilization." Their point of departure was the following projection: 20 percent of the potentially active population should suffice "to produce all the goods and all the high-value-added services that globalized society will have the means to indulge in." 

The "superfluous" 80 percent "can be kept quiet if they can eat enough to satisfy their hunger and stultify themselves with entertainments." [5]. For their consumption of food and entertainment, a sort of "basic income" could be assured for them. Moreover, a "modest remuneration" could incite them to "offer voluntary non-profit services" or to "participate in sports activities." On the subject of these social incomes, the assembly limited itself to indicating that "the pressure of global competition will prohibit the expectation that company heads should participate in the financing of social measures."

One may interpret the proposal of a Tobin tax striking foreign exchange market transactions and - why not? - speculative transactions in general, as an attempt to bend the refusal by "company heads" to allow their profits to be taxed. 

But what holds for fiscal deductions holds also for the Tobin tax: they will not durably bring in the anticipated financial resources unless they do not restrain speculative transactions on financial markets; or, more precisely, unless the contraction of the global volume of profits realized from the production of goods continues to be offset by the gigantic speculative revenues that the financial industry draws from market operations, most particularly from the engorgement of ever-more-enormous financial bubbles that allow real money to be borrowed against Himalayan mountains of fictitious capital and even against mortgages and other debt instruments.