The swindler-in-chief’s shakedown efforts have taken a predictable turn today. Reports a sympathetic Bloomberg:

“President Barack Obama proposed raising about $190 billion over the next decade by outlawing three offshore tax-avoidance techniques. Obama’s plan also would make it riskier for Americans to stash money in tax-havens.”

Note how the efforts of private property owners to retain what is theirs by right are criminalized with the use of terms such as “stash away,” “tax avoidance,” “abusive,” “hiding money.” But state theft of said property is framed as “raising money,” “closing loopholes,” and conducting a “tax overhaul.”

The tax code is “full of corporate loopholes that makes it perfectly legal for companies to avoid paying their fair share,” Obama said at the White House today, as he outlined the plan [and as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner looked on with that evil-gnome scowl of his].

In 2001, I had the unusual occasion to commend the Bush Administration for refusing “to support an attempt by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to clamp down on tax havens. If the junta of high-tax governments has its way,” I wrote in the Financial Post, “not only will there be no place left to run to, but by eliminating what tax havens offer, these governments will have eliminated tax competition, and with it the imperative to downsize their fiefdoms.”

In “The War on Tax Havens,” I strongly condemned the coercive efforts of the OECD to strangle, “sanctuaries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Malta, Mauritius and San Marino are rolling over.”

The sentiment applies to the Obaminator in spades. I fully expect him, moreover, to fulfill the UN’s dream of establishing an international tax collection organization, so as to better co-ordinate the confiscation of private property.

Incidentally, a few weeks back the administration (and Bush would have been of the same mind) sanctimoniously castigated Castro for taxing remittances from the US. Pot. Kettle. Black. And oh the hypocrisy! The US is one of the few nations to tax the income that nationals earn outside its borders.

Recommended: “The War on Tax Havens”