The Tobin Tax
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As the lethal neoliberal ideology continues to dominate our lives, capital is enjoying a freedom that puts human freedoms to shame. Over a trillion dollars a day quickly travel in and out of national economies, sometimes within hours, in order to make unproductive profit. The fast-paced game of currency speculation is rivalling soccer as the global sport of choice, but the stakes involved in the new American pastime are much higher than a shiny new World Series ring.
The consequences of currency speculation and other short-term capital flows are severe and many, including major losses in government autonomy and economic instability, resulting in increased poverty, human misery and environmental degredation. Both of these dilemnas spell trouble for democracy and human well-being, and history has provided us with countless currency crises and other economic disasters to illustrate the potential tragedy (the Mexican peso crisis of 1994 and the ‘Asian Flu’ of 1997-98 being two of the most recent and deadly).
Economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin, however, has provided us with an answer to this neocapitalist quandary. By applying a miniscule tax every time a currency is exchanged, destabilizing short-term transactions would incur large costs, and would therefore become for the most part unprofitable.
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@ June 16, 2003