Forward Down the Road to Serfdom: International Tax Law as a Means of Central Planning

Abstract

Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, warned of the dangers to a free society from central planning. Efforts by the rich country clubs of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union (EU) to impose new international tax rules through a variety of initiatives aimed at increasing their share of global tax revenues, are leading us further down the road Hayek warned against. These initiatives move us from a world in which the complicated tax issues raised by cross-border transactions and entities is resolved through a complex web of bilateral tax treaties to one in which tax administrations, following OECD- and EU-drafted rules will increasingly intervene in internal organizational decisions of businesses by making the tax consequences independent of the actual organization. The paper outlines Hayek’s theory of why planning leads to the road to serfdom and then shows how the new rich-country-drafted global tax order is sending us speeding down it.

Keywords: international taxation, BEPS, MLI, Hayek

JEL Classification: K20, K34, K33