It should be noted that when individuals attempt to place income in foreign bank accounts for these same purposes, they are either arrested for tax evasion or subject to an audit (unless, it seems, they are Mitt Romney caught using offshore tax havens that happen to be perfectly legal). You are probably free of the legal concerns, at least, if you are an individual whose wealth is so significant that it can be arranged into trusts, corporations, funds, and other legal frameworks. In that case, while the benefit to the individual in question might be significant -- qualifying for 0 to 15 percent interest as opposed to 33 to 60 percent, depending on the countries involved -- the responsibility of that individual to pay for offramps and old folks homes is suddenly lifted.

And herein lies our modern predicament. There is a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance involved in all of the political, legal, and financial frameworks we have working in society. The nation-state -- which is still relatively new as far as history is concerned -- tells us as individuals in a very clear voice, "You belong to me, from birth to death. You have rights and responsibilities, and how you go about discharging them will guide whether you get honorific titles and a big house, or a prison cell." And the vast majority of the population of every country has bought into it.

Yet, at the same moment, we have corporations and individuals-rich-enough-to-be-corporations whose money is not fully expected to contribute to any of the projects of the nation-state: security, transportation, health, science. The nation-state whispers to them in a somewhat more tentative voice, "Well, we're willing to negotiate." And as to the rest of us, we're not sure to whom these institutions belong. The nation-state looks the other way as corporate money wends its way from Seychelles to Mauritius to Ireland while lobbyists negotiate special tax rates should the money finally arrive "home" -- but is quick to write checks for all the tax credits it promised. And even a man hoping to be president of a nation-state can look squarely in the camera and suggest to potential voters that he and his family got wealthy from business conducted in a certain place, but want to make sure their friends don't become "entangled" in the system of taxes that is responsible for maintaining the basic infrastructure that made it all possible in the first place.

This lack of clarity could challenge the legitimacy of the institutions we have taken pains to build over the last couple centuries, the ones that keep us comfortable and protected and civilized. The writer Nicole Foss in the blog Automatic Earth recently forecast the coming reduction in the "trust horizon," in which individuals believe less and less that these large institutions will support anything positive in their daily lives. All this turmoil from housing bubbles and derivatives and subprimes and currency swaps and Greece and Germany and austerity is eroding the trust we have in top-down institutions. This is particularly true because of the corporations who are first in line to use the nation-state as a wheelbarrow for its risk, and which exploit every rule to claim that technically the income belongs to no one, especially not the nation-state that made their very existence possible, and shouldn't be taxed.