“If you’ve never heard of the obscure and seemingly boring Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), I don’t blame you.
Few people have, and even fewer fully grasp what it really means or the terrible things that it’s a harbinger for.
Readers of International Man of any duration will no doubt be familiar with it. (In case you aren’t, see here and here to get up to speed.)
That so few people understand FATCA is perhaps not surprising. Often, otherwise offensive government actions and institutions are given dull and opaque names to obfuscate their true purpose.
I think the Federal Reserve is an excellent example of this.
After two experiments with central banking in the US failed to take root in the 1800s, anything associated with a central bank became deeply unpopular with the public.
So, the central banking advocates decided to try something new—a fresh branding strategy.
Rather than call their new central bank the Third Bank of the United States (the previous ones were named the First and Second Bank of the United States respectively), they decided to give it a vague and boring name that would conceal from the average person what it really was: a central bank. They chose the name “Federal Reserve” for that purpose.
I’d say they were pretty successful, unfortunately. Nearly 100 years later, most Americans don’t have the slightest clue what the Federal Reserve is, what it does, nor how it affects them.
I believe the same dynamic is at work with FATCA.
While FATCA is ostensibly about cracking down on offshore tax evasion, I think another motive is at play.
So let’s peel back the layers of this onion and find out.”
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