A Man, A Plan, A Canal, and Multinational Shell Corporations

Sometimes I wish I was surprised by this stuff. The revelations that came to us from the "Panama Papers," a deluge of leaked information about the goings on in the banks of Panama.  Panama has been known for years to be right up there with Switzerland and the Cayman Islands in terms of being a solid place to stash ill-gotten gains or money that you would rather not have your government knowing about.  I'm not even going to pretend I know anything about international banking or high finance, because I'm lucky if I can balance my bank account and pay the mortgage on time, but I would like to comment on the rather inevitable reality of the fact that some of the richest and most powerful people in the world have been dodging their responsibilities to their own nations.
The list of notable people is long and growing.
And if you're at all surprised... well I'm so very sorry to tell you that that parcel of land you bought in the Everglades is probably not going to make a very good retirement option.  Being cynical in today's world comes as naturally as breathing, which is kind of a shame, because we really do have some wonderful upside.  Global poverty rates are on the decline, persistent and epidemic diseases are being cured pretty much daily, human rights are creeping along a steady upward path.
But the love of money is still the root of all kinds of evil.
You would think that people who make millions and billions of dollars would find a way to live on the paltry percentages that the government lets them keep, given that what they get to keep amounts to more than I will make in a lifetime, and the approximate GDP of Burma put together. But no, once you find out that having money exponentially increases your ability to make more money and to keep more of that more money, it is probably a bit too much to ask that people do not avail themselves of some "simple" tax shelter plans.
One interesting thing about the Panama Papers is that the US is largely absent from the roles, while China, an ostensibly communist country, has some Bond villain level chicanery happening.  Which illustrates one of the fundamental problems with even the purest Marxist ideal (which China is decidedly not): it does not account for how greedy people can be.  The idea of a truly egalitarian system, economically, politically and such, still remains the stuff of fiction because humans are human.
What goes begging in the breeding ground of cynicism is the common good of humanity.  We stop believing it's possible for us to truly form just societies.  We assume that someone is always gaming the system, and so why shouldn't we get in on that?
By virtue of my profession, I like to use the Scripture to compare and contrast cultural attitudes towards how we handle money and the ethics that are prescribed by the Scriptures.  I have noticed that people generally like to focus on the prosperity angle when it comes to the Bible talking about money, but I think it is rather more crucial look at it from the perspective of what it is trying to teach us, rather than as a sort of cheat code to prosperity (not that it even works that way).  Back in the Hebrew Scriptures, we have the story of Ruth, which paints us a picture of a society where justice was at least a possibility, even if it was always hanging under the threat of someone doing something out of bounds.  We find that Ruth, a foreigner, a Moabite, and eventual relative of Jesus, who has come to Israel with Naomi, her mother-in-law, finds a place and a level of subsistence through the practice of gleaning.  The welfare of these two widows was dependent on a prescribed form of social welfare for the Israelites:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien; I am the Lord your God. -Leviticus 19: 9-10 NRSV

Now, I have mixed feelings about some of the stuff in Leviticus, but this is something I think we Biblical types could really get behind.  The idea of taking what you have worked for, but stopping with "enough," and seeing the practice of greed (even in the guise of efficiency), is ultimately destructive to God's people. That is the essence of most of the laws given in the Hebrew Scriptures, they are designed to teach people how to be a little better to each other.  We can certainly read some of them with different intent, but Jesus reminds us that the essence of the law is love: love God, love your neighbor, these are the lenses through which we must read the law,
Notice that the law doesn't actually require that you not make a living, or do well for yourself, it simply asks that you leave some room for those who are left out. Trying to get out of paying your fair share would seem to me to be a fundamentally opposed to both the Law and the Gospel. I never really expect that the principalities and powers are going to give a hoot about the Law or the Gospel, but I guess it's just a little schadenfreude-alicious to see this all hit the fan.