富人天堂摩纳哥 I’ve seen the future, and it’s Monaco

In Monaco, I briefly felt like a billionaire. Though it was December, every afternoon I swam in a heated pool on the roof of my hotel. On one side was the Mediterranean, on the other the mountains, and everywhere were apartment blocks crammed with tax-dodgers. It was perfectly quiet: noise is the enemy of the principality, even worse than socialism.

在摩纳哥，我过了一段亿万富翁般的生活。虽然已经是12月份了，但我每天下午都在酒店屋顶加热的游泳池里游泳。一边是地中海，一边是连绵的山脉，四处都是塞满了避税者的公寓区。十分安静：噪音是公国的敌人，比社会主义更可恶。

I had arrived expecting to write that Monaco was the past: tax havens, I’d read, were under threat. Instead, I returned to middle-class life feeling that the tiny state for rich people is the global future. As western countries emerge from recession, the contours of post-crash society are becoming visible: increasingly, the rich inhabit a low-tax universe segregated from everyone else.

我本想来这里写写摩纳哥已成过去时的报道。根据我看到的消息，避税天堂正面临威胁。然而，当我重返中产阶层的生活时，我却觉得，这个富人济济的小国才是全球未来的样子。随着西方国家走出衰退，危机后社会的轮廓正逐渐显现出来：富人越来越多地居住在与他人隔绝的低税世界里。

It’s true that tax havens have taken some stick lately. In April 2009, the depths of recession, global leaders threatened them. Gordon Brown, the then British prime minister, announced at the G20 summit that banking secrecy “must come to an end”.

避税天堂近来的确招致了一些批评。2009年4月，正当经济衰退处于最严重的时候，全球领导人威胁要拿它们开刀。时任英国首相戈登•布朗(Gordon Brown)在20国集团(G20)峰会上宣布，银行业的保密惯例“必须到此为止”。

Yet walking Monaco’s streets, you are soon reassured. “The rock”, as locals call it, or “a sunny place for shady people”, as the writer Somerset Maugham put it, has survived both the recession and demands for transparency just fine. The men are still wrinkly, and the women blonde and armed with tiny dogs.

然而，走在摩纳哥的街道上，你很快就会放下心来。“岩石之国”——这是当地人的叫法，或说“阴暗人物的阳光之地”——这是作家索默斯特•毛姆(Somerset Maugham)给它的称呼，既安然渡过了经济衰退，也无损于要求其提高透明度的压力。男人们依然是满脸皱纹，而女人们多为金发碧眼，怀抱小狗。

Walking around town, you can hear your own footsteps. Stopping at an estate agent’s window, you goggle at prices. Mere millionaires need not apply. A large flat overlooking the port costs €17.8m – although that’s nothing compared with the penthouse sold here recently by the British Candy brothers for €240m, the world’s record price for a private home. (Full disclosure: my bid for this property was trumped.) Monaco’s house prices are the world’s highest. No wonder, with so many multimillionaires packed into a country smaller than New York’s Central Park. I stopped at what looked like another estate agent to goggle more, but it wasn’t an estate agent. It was selling private planes.

在城里漫步，你能听到自己的脚步声。驻足房产中介的橱窗前，你会被价格吓得瞪大眼睛。区区百万富翁也未必买得起。一套俯瞰港口的大型公寓要价1780万欧元。然而，跟英国坎迪兄弟最近在本地卖出的一所顶层豪宅相比，这真是不值一提。那套房子以2.4亿欧元成交，创下世界最贵的私人住宅纪录。（透露一下：我出的价格被人超过去了。）摩纳哥的房价是全世界最高的。这也难怪，毕竟这个面积比纽约中央公园还小的国家富豪云集。我在另一家看似房产中介的屋子前停下脚步，眼睛瞪得更大了。不过人家不是房产中介，而是卖私人飞机的。

Monaco masquerades as a small town from the olden days. You pass dinky little shops, children playing unaccompanied on the beach, and fur-clad Madame Billionaires feeding birds in parks. It’s so comfortable that female life expectancy here is 94.

摩纳哥从古时候起就装出一副小城镇的样子。你走过一家家整洁的小商店；孩子们独自在沙滩上玩耍，没有大人陪伴；全身毛皮制品的亿万富婆在公园里喂鸟。由于生活舒适，此地女性的平均寿命高达94岁。

Yet Monaco is a facsimile of a “community”, because only the rich belong. The principality resembles the global future because it has two classes: jet-owners and bus passengers. The 35,000 residents are rich. About 39,000 people commute daily from France and Italy to serve them.

然而，摩纳哥就像一个“大同世界”，因为这里的居民只有富人。之所以说这个公国仿佛就是未来世界，是因为这里只有两个阶层：拥有喷气式飞机的人和乘坐巴士的人。3.5万名居民是富人，还有大约3.9万人每天从法国和意大利坐车过来，为富人们服务。

Anyone who belongs to neither class is suspect here, and liable to get stopped by the police. Monaco supposedly has one cop per 62 inhabitants, plus copious CCTV cameras. I met a millionaire’s son who had been hauled off for questioning after he was spotted hanging around outside unshaven in jeans. Visible involvement in violence is a faux pas here: Mark Thatcher, Maggie’s son, was denied residency after helping finance a coup in Equatorial Guinea.

不属于这两个阶层的人都是可疑人物，很容易被警察拦下。据说，摩纳哥每62名居民中就有1名警察，还有遍布各处的闭路电视摄像头。我碰到一位百万富翁的儿子，他就曾被警察叫住盘问，原因是他在外头四处晃荡，而且胡子拉渣，穿着牛仔裤。暴露于人前的暴力行径在此地被认为有失体统：摩纳哥拒绝了撒切尔夫人之子马克•撒切尔(Mark Thatcher)的定居申请，因为他资助过赤道几内亚的一次政变。

Overseeing the show is Prince Albert. Most monarchs nowadays rarely bother their subjects. But in Monaco you feel every day that you are living in a monarchy, as if you were an 18th-century peasant. At the conference I attended, everyone stood up whenever Albert walked in. His portraits festoon town.

监察这派景象的是阿尔贝亲王(Prince Albert)。当代君主大多不怎么干预臣民的生活。但在摩纳哥，你每天都会感觉到自己生活在一个君主国家，仿佛你就是18世纪的一名佃农。在我出席的一次会议上，每当阿尔贝走进来，大家就全体起立。他的肖像挂满了全城。

Albert oversaw Monaco’s response to the G20. Being a tax haven seems to embarrass him, but he likes rich residents. Monaco therefore signed “tax information exchange agreements” with 24 states, and became a slightly more transparent tax haven.

阿尔贝亲自负责摩纳哥对G20的回应。摩纳哥是个避税天堂，似乎让他有点尴尬，可他喜欢富有的居民。为此，摩纳哥和24个国家签订了“税务信息交换协议”，成为稍微透明一点的避税天堂。

And so, as the Great Recession lifts, the trend of recent decades in western countries continues. As Randy Newman sings: “ … the rich just get richer/and the poor you don’t ever have to see”.

于是，随着“大衰退”步伐远去，近几十年在西方国家兴起的趋势继续向前发展。正如兰迪•纽曼(Randy Newman)所唱的：“……富人只会变得更富/而穷人你永远不必看到”。

The rich have escaped the recession almost unscathed. Even where states raise taxes, the rich are usually nimble enough to escape. Often they own political parties: the Republicans kept alive President Bush’s tax cuts for the richest Americans. And tax havens abound. Even in bankrupt Ireland, Google pays virtually no tax on the billions it channels through the country.

富人近乎毫发无伤地摆脱了衰退。即使是在政府增税的国家，富人也总有本事逃脱。他们往往左右着政党：托共和党的福，小布什针对最富有美国人的减税政策得以继续实施。而且避税天堂比比皆是。即使是在潦倒的爱尔兰，每天有几十亿资金出入这个国家的谷歌(Google)也不用缴多少税。

But states need money from someone, and so the poor pay instead. Ireland’s new whizzo scheme is to levy income tax on people earning just €15,300. The poor everywhere also pay a sort of “noise tax”: they rarely live in perfect silence. And now they’re losing their public services, notably in the UK, where the billionaire retailer Philip Green recently headed a review of public spending. Coincidentally, Sir Philip’s wife lives in Monaco. “My wife’s not a tax exile,” he explains, and I’m sure tax is a tedious irrelevance to the Greens. Still, as parables go, you couldn’t make it up.

但国家需要有人出钱，于是只能由穷人来付了。爱尔兰新制定的极棒的计划，是对薪酬仅15300欧元的人征收所得税。此外，世界各地的穷人还要缴纳一种“噪音税”：他们很少居住在十分安静的地方。如今，他们还将逐渐失去公共服务，尤其是在英国：身为亿万富翁的零售商菲利浦•格林(Philip Green)近期负责对公共开支展开评估。巧合的是，菲利浦爵士的妻子就住在摩纳哥。他解释说：“我妻子并不是跑到国外避税。”我相信税收对格林夫妇来说只是无聊的琐事而已。不过，俗话说，不能胡扯。

Swimming on the roof in Monaco, some past December swims came back to me: in my grandparents’ pool in white Johannesburg in the 1980s. I’d never then seen anything like the wealth gap of South Africa under apartheid. We ate chocolate cake on the lawn; the maids lived behind the kitchen. It turned out that this was the future.

在摩纳哥酒店的屋顶游泳时，过去在12月里游泳的情景浮上了我的脑海：那是上世纪80年代在白人的天地——约翰内斯堡我祖父的游泳池里。在实行种族隔离的南非，我第一次见识到了这么严重的贫富差距：我们在草坪上吃着巧克力蛋糕，女仆们则住在厨房后头。事实证明，这正是未来的景象。