"Basically, the people of Britain voted to leave the EU because the EU and national freedom don’t mix. And now the government and people of Ireland are learning that the hard way."

Of course, freedom shouldn't be confused with anarchy. And that means when a society legitimately agrees on certain laws and rules, that society can and should punish offenders. But the problem with big centralized and unelected powers like the EU is that the people in many of the countries have not legitimately agreed to that level of governance. And, all too often, when those people have complained about that, they've been ignored, dismissed, or slammed with even more autocratic dictates than they suffered with before. And so, the people of Britain voted to leave that kind of abusive arrangement and now the people of Ireland may do the same — if they're smart.

If any of this EU chicanery and power-hungry madness has my fellow American readers feeling somehow smug and superior to our European counterparts, take a look in the mirror. Because when it comes to hypocrisy in international trade and politics, the U.S. government is definitely a contender for the world title. The U.S. continues to maintain just about the highest corporate tax rate in the world. And the real reason Treasury Secretary Jack Lew opposed this EU move to grab more taxes from Apple is because the U.S. considers those potential taxes to be ours!

But that's not all. Despite massive increases in federal tax revenues to record highs, Lew has made an annoying habit of wailing about corporate tax inversions that cost the Treasury a pittance compared to those record trillions the Treasury has been taking in lately.

Presidents and even presidential candidates from both parties routinely complain about foreign-currency manipulation when no one country has manipulated its currency more than the U.S. from the moment we took the dollar off the gold standard 45 years ago to every Fed interest-rate move and comment up to today.

There's simply not a lot of room for freedom when the world's governments are too busy fighting over how much money they can take from those who create the wealth in the first place. There was once a time when sales taxes and customs duties were enough to fund the engines of state from Europe to the New World. But now we've somehow come to a place where corporate taxes are not only an accepted policy, but we actually hear from politicians and economists who argue no country should have the sovereign right to charge its own corporate tax rate … because that wouldn't be "fair" to the other countries who want to charge more. The strong argument many have made to abolish corporate tax rates altogether to boost economic growth all over the world isn't even making it into this current Apple/Ireland/EU kerfuffle, and we're all the poorer for it.

The EU and "progressive" groups that call for uniform tax rates are actually right when they say economic freedom does not produce "fair" results. That's what makes freedom what it is. But the alternative, as Ireland and Apple know all too well now, is allowing someone you don't know and certainly didn't elect to decide what's fair for you and everyone else. That's not fair either. That's something else we call "tyranny."

Commentary by Jake Novak, supervising producer of "Power Lunch." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.



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