Brussels on Thursday dusted off a set of proposals aimed at extracting more revenue from multinational companies. Better watch out, because some or all of these measures may become law.

European leaders often complain that multinationals avoid paying a “fair share” of tax. The Anti-Tax-Avoidance Package is supposed to remedy this by changing accounting rules and boosting reporting requirements….

Part of the EU’s beef is that low-tax member nations supposedly are competing unfairly with high-tax members. Another part is that some member nations cut better deals with multinational corporations to influence where these corporations locate their headquarters than other member nations are willing to cut.

Once again, social democracy misses two critical points. One is that if a nation is having trouble competing with another nation on the basis of tax rates or deal cutting, that nation should lower its tax rates and/or cut better deals, and thereby compete.  It shouldn’t whine about the competition.

The other is this: it isn’t Government’s money. Not even in Europe.