“Tinker, Tinker, Little Star…”
The super-rich, profit-seeking big corporations and Wall St financiers are to continue to exist but be taxed more — how revolutionary and radical is that! Pie-in-the-sky reformism.
The main problem with such proposals is not that they are not going to work, but that they spread the view that they could work and so reinforce reformist illusions about capitalism being able to be reformed to function other than as a profit-driven system where profits have to be put before people. What this does is delay people coming to understand that capitalism can’t be reformed in these sorts of ways and that the only way forward is socialism. It helps prolong capitalism.
It is a demand for a minimal tax on the financial transactions in which capitalists try to swindle each other out of the proceeds of their past exploitation of the working class. It really is one of the most pathetic reform proposals.
if just one major financial centre were free of the tax, the speculation would gravitate there. And even if countries all introduced a Tobin tax, the financial sector could formally switch its business to offshore branches from the Cayman Islands to Singapore and so undermine the intended restricting effect. Failure is guaranteed.