There is a specific genre of journalism that the corporate press reserves for threats to the ruling class.
You can see it in the recent Reuters feature, “Norway’s lesson for Europe on wealth taxes: let some millionaires go”.
The article opens with the story of Borger Borgenhaug sitting in a “lakeside villa” in Switzerland, lamenting that he misses “the smell of the Nordic sea”. We are supposed to weep for a man who abandoned his grandchildren to save 1.1% of his fortune. Reuters presents him as a tragic exile rather than a real-estate tycoon tax dodger.
It is a masterclass in emotional manipulation and statistical obfuscation. The framing is clear: if you tax the rich, if they’re inconvenienced at all, they will leave, and your economy will collapse.
But what if the millionaire flight was a fiction designed by plutocrats to keep you poor?
A forensic analysis by the Tax Justice Network exposes the data underpinning these headlines as little more than junk economics and propaganda laundered by media outlets.
The “thousands” of millionaires supposedly fleeing from wealth taxes? The data comes from firms like Henley & Partners — companies that literally sell “golden passports” to the super-rich. They have a direct financial incentive to (lie to) terrify governments into maintaining low-tax regimes that keep their clients rich and mobile.
Even worse is the methodology behind these reports. The Reuters article reports that data on Norway comes from “New World Wealth, which draws on public sources including LinkedIn”. The TJN report shows that the “public sources” that these firms track aren’t reliable or genuine sources like tax residency data or border crossings, but solely by scanning LinkedIn profiles. If a CEO updates their location to “Dubai” for a six-month project, the capitalist press screams that the tax base is collapsing.
Even if you accept the nonsense, junk data from New World Wealth or Henley & Partners, the TJN found that the “exodus” from the UK amounted to just 0.3% of the millionaire population. That’s a rounding error, not a “millionaire flight” — 99.7% of the millionaires stayed put and paid the extra tax.
Reuters repeats the claim that Norway’s tax “hinders investment”, then buries the fact that Norway remains one of the world’s most equal societies with high ease of doing business.
The evidence in Reuters is interviews with the “victims” of the tax (plutocrats and tech-bros who believe their hoarding is more important than the social contract) while failing to critically examine the “exit tax” loopholes these people previously exploited. The few millionaires who did leave Norway, according to the Reuters article, did so not because the tax was bad, but because it was finally, actually enforced. Closing loopholes that allowed the ultra-rich to indefinitely commit tax evasion demonstrates the policy is a success!
“Reporting” like this — and the 10,000 or so media articles covering similar junk from the UK — is a protection racket for the ultra-wealthy, enabling them to hold governments hostage with the threat of capital flight. Mainstream outlets like Reuters, even the Guardian, take the bad-faith demands of the billionaire hostage-takers and present them as neutral “lessons” for governments.
Typically, we assume economic reporting is based on hard tax data or census figures, not social media scraping. When it comes to the interests of tycoons, the independent, technocratic reporting is just a veil for propaganda.
The lesson from Norway isn’t that wealth taxes fail. It’s that they work. And they’re popular. That’s why the propaganda machine is working overtime to kill them. The rich aren’t going anywhere and even if they did, the vast majority of their assets are physical things like factories, land, building or businesses that are located in national boundaries that cannot be picked up and packed into a Tumi suitcase. These assets are social creations, rooted in nation-states.
If a few oligarchs and rentiers want to leave because they can’t hoard 100% of the surplus value created by others? Let them go.