At the G8 summit going down in Northern Ireland over the weekend, British Prime Minister David Cameron will take the opportunity to once again decry the shady role of “tax havens” across the world and talk up his leading-by-example plans to clamp down on the ostensibly nefarious tax-haven activities of Britain’s crown dependencies and overseas territories, via the Telegraph:

The Prime Minister wants to persuade his counterparts at this weekend’s G8 summit to agree to a crackdown on offshore tax havens across the world and will announce that the UK overseas territories and crown dependencies, such as the British Virgin Islands, have signed up to an information-sharing agreement on tax.

Really, the audacity of countries that dare to lure businesses and wealth their way because of their more attractive tax schemes that don’t discourage competition! If Cameron really wants to stop companies from searching for worthwhile means to lessen their tax burdens, he should probably start by making it worth their while to stick around in the first place, instead of hating on other countries that are smart enough to — oh, wait, what’s that? He is doing that? Oh… well, good!

Speaking at an innovation conference in London on Friday, Mr Cameron said: “We want all our businesses to succeed and we are actually changing our tax system to try to encourage more multinationals to locate in the UK.” Britain is on course to have one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the West from 2015, after it was cut to 20pc in the March Budget. … Writing in Friday’s Daily Telegraph, Ryan Bourne, head of economic research at the Centre for Policy Studies, said that the “shrill posturing” by MPs on tax avoidance was threatening “to cause long-term harm to the UK economy”. … Mr Cameron said he was concerned about the relative failure of home-grown British companies to grow as quickly as foreign rivals.

While there may-or-may-not be a few legitimate concerns about the specific “tax havens” to which Cameron is referring, the larger discussion is too often used as a distraction from and an excuse for the crushing burden that governments place on companies and individuals via taxes and regulations that make it more productive for them to spend their time looking elsewhere for places to do business and store their money. Time and and time and time again, in even just very modern history, we see examples of countries suddenly ‘discovering’ that their gigantic tax codes are hurtful to economic growth and that they need to dial it back down — and it sounds like Cameron is actually trying to do something about it. Now if we could just get President Obama and the Democrats to think the same way…