Dr. Daniel Mitchell, senior tax policy analyst at Cato Institute in Washington DC, gave a talk about progressive taxes at the University of Iceland 16 November 2012, invited by RNH and the newly-f0unded Icelandic Union of Taxpayers. Mitchell pointed out that the main role of taxes is to obtain the revenue necessary to pay for government services. By double taxation, such as taxes on dividends and capital gains, the accumulation of capital, necessary in a growing economy, is made more difficult. Tax authorities should not discriminate between future consumption (or investment) and present consumption. Mitchell argued that a high progressive incomes tax as has recently been imposed in Iceland, and a special wealth tax were both very inefficient kinds of taxes.

Mitchell’s visit to Iceland provoked much discussion. The daily Morgunbladid published an interview with Mitchell 20 November 2012. Vidskiptabladid, a weekly business magazine, gave an account of his lecture 1 December. Oli Bjorn Karason, economist and alternate Member of Parliament for the Independence Party, published an article about Mitchell’s message in Morgunbladid 21 November. Lawyer Finnur Thor Vilhjalmsson criticized Mitchell in an article in left-wing newspaper DV 8 December 2012.

Mitchell Slides 2012

Mats Persson, Director of London think tank Open Europe, gave a talk 12 November on European integration, invited by RNH, the Institute of International Affairs at the University of Iceland and the Icelandic website Evropean Watch. Persson pointed out that the EU faced both political, economic and monetary crises. He argued that the authors of the euro project had been far too optimistic about one currency being feasible for different economies. Economic productivity in the PIIGS-countries, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, was not as high as in Germany, the Netherlands and Finland. The PIIGS-countries had not lowered domestic costs in the same way as for example Estonia. It was, Persson said, interesting to compare the share of different clusters of states in World GDP: The US and the EU as a whole were slowly reducing their share, whereas the eurozone itself was reducing its share quite rapidly, and the BRICS-countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, were increasing their share. In many eurozone countries the economies were stagnant and unemployment high. The three options available were not good: 1) cost-cutting in the weaker countries and temporary support from the stronger ones; 2) greater centralisation in Brussels; 3) Greece and possibly other countries leaving the eurozone. Morgunbladid published an interview with Persson 12 September, and the same day Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation broadcast an interview with him. Persson’s talk will soon be available on Youtube.

Persson Slides

Photo: Mbl./Kristinn

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson read a paper on “Mao: The Story Which Has Been Told” at a meeting organised by the Confucius Institute at the University of Iceland 2 November 2012. He gave an account of the controversy in Iceland about Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, published in a translation by Olafur Teitur Gudnason in 2007. Professor Gissurarson responded to several criticisms directed at the book by Geir Sigurdsson, a Chinese-speaking philosopher and former director of the Icelandic Confucius Institute, and historian Sverrir Jakobsson. According to Professor Gissurarson, the book was an extraordinary accomplishment, the criticisms of it being about minor details, mostly debatable, and not changing the main fact that Mao was one of the worst mass murderers of the Twentieth Century, comparable to Stalin and Hitler. Using the criteria laid down in the Nuremberg Trials, Mao was guilty of crimes against the peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Professor Gissurarson showed a video of Marshal Peng Dehuai—who had opposed Mao’s insane “Great Leap Forward”—being beaten and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution. Professor Gissurarson pointed out that much was already known about Mao’s crimes in Iceland: In 1952, for example, former missionary Johann Hannesson wrote a series of newspaper articles about mass executions in China after the communist victory in the civil war, and in 1963 private letters from an Icelandic student in China, Skuli Magnusson, to his fellow socialists, on the 1958–62 famine and Maoist terror, were published, without his consent. The lecture was well-attended, and will soon be available on Youtube. Former Justice Minister Bjorn Bjarnason blogged about it, and 10 November 2012 Morgunbladid reported on it.

Gissurarson Slides 02.11.2012