Thanks to the leak of 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, Britain is fixated on how we tax the wealthy and the powerful. Revelations that David Cameron’s family fi nances were tangled up in the tax haven of Panama, have caused an endless political kerfuffle and put a new cudgel in the hands of people who want to attack him.
A few have called this the “Panama tax avoidance scandal,” but this reveals a profound misunderstanding of tax havens. Tax is important, but it’s a subsidiary issue—and that goes for tax havens more generally. The dangers these places pose are of a greater order.