‘When people and companies use legal means to minimize taxes, that’s not corrupt or greedy or unfair; it’s playing by the rules.’

Did you just feel the earth move? Maybe you’re not paying attention, because the “Panama Papers” have already been rated the biggest bombshell of the decade. A “huge news story” about international “greed and corruption” involving offshore tax havens, one Canadian media professor tweeted Monday morning. Why, this could be more earth-shaking than LuxLeaks. Perhaps you don’t remember LuxLeaks, the 2014 bombshell that was supposed to blow the lid off sneaky ways the rich and powerful evade taxes. If not, don’t worry. You probably won’t remember the Panama Papers, soon, either.

LuxLeaks found some multinational corporations taking perfectly legal advantage of the ability to park profits in Luxembourg at lower tax rates. A year before that, in 2013, the CBC wallpapered its TV news broadcasts, radio programming and websites for days with its “Secrecy for Sale” exposé, using “an unprecedented leak of data… that involves more than 100,000 people from around the world,” nearly 500 of them in Canada. The CBC named just one — Regina lawyer Tony Merchant, who would later file a libel suit against the CBC’s reporting on his alleged “tax haven.” But, as the CBC itself admitted, “the reality (is) that holding an offshore account is not evidence of wrongdoing and may not be controversial.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CBC came up with no more controversies.

Once again, the Panama Papers have all the juicy ingredients to get journalists in a lather: An avalanche of documents leaked from a white- shoe Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, specializing in helping global clients shelter money in Caribbean tax havens; talk of “billions” squirrelled into secret accounts; mentions of enough prominent names — Lionel Messi! Jackie Chan! Vladimir Putin! — that hint at a clandestine conspiracy by the Bilderberg Illuminati to screw the rest of us suckers. The Toronto Star naturally devoted not just its entire front page, but several more inside, to the revelations Monday, highlighting in supersized type the scope of the numbers: “11.5 million” documents, “2.6 terabytes” of data, “29” Forbes-listed billionaires mentioned, plus “12” political leaders.

The number of actual scandals so far? One. And not even a particularly exciting one at that. The Icelandic prime minister allegedly used Mossack Fonseca to register a company that lost big on bonds of failed Icelandic banks, which he later helped claimants’ reach a deal over. It certainly doesn’t look good for Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, but it’s a sign that your globe-rocking scoop is off to a weak start when its big opener is a conflict-of-interest allegation against an Icelandic parliamentarian. Even Putin appears to go unmentioned by name in any of the documents, while his network of cronies salt away billions of dollars skimmed from his corrupt state.

As for the 350 Canadians apparently mentioned in this mountain of misconduct, the details appear to promise several news cycles of disappointment. The Star (it and the CBC were the only Canadian media allowed access to the documents), says it will deliver the story of a “Canadian art maven” with a “hidden corporate network”; a Toronto-based firm “fighting to lift the corporate veil that masks the ownership” of an allegedly Nazi-looted masterpiece; and a “Dubai-based Canadian lawyer” who helps global clients shelter money. How very nonscandalous. The Star also outs several Canadians whose passport photos appear in the Mossack Fonseca files. Not one of the “exposed” is shown to have done anything dirty.

But that’s the beauty of these routine exposés, which are really about convincing us the rich still aren’t being soaked hard enough. Every media organization is careful to note that “much of this is perfectly legal,” as the Star put it, and “offshore accounts are not in themselves illegal” as the CBC eventually mentions. But the mere idea that anyone could arrange finances using foreign holdings to minimize taxes — even when it’s all totally legitimate, as will be the case in nearly all these files — is enough to justify the unseemly snooping into private affairs. “The rich play get to play by different rules than the rest of us,” complain the Star’s editors, in their front-page justification for their sensationalism. “That’s unfair — and everyone should know about it.”

No, actually. The rules are precisely the same, rich or poor. Unlawful activity is illegal no matter the income bracket. But avoiding taxes isn’t just legal and available to anyone, it’s often a policy goal, as governments seek to give breaks for certain behaviour, and reshape their economies into low-tax magnets for foreign investors. Canada even earns a mention in the Mossack Fonseca documents as one option for clients to shelter cash, perhaps due to the same comparatively low business taxes that have attracted multinationals, like Burger King, to relocate here using tax inversions.

“Money goes wherever it wants and … It wants to go where there is no tax,” commented Allison Christians, McGill University’s chair in tax law, in response to the Panama Papers report. And it’s clear that the agenda behind these routine exposés is to inspire more rules and regulations to stop that; more barriers to capital mobility. The same group is behind all of them: the Center for Public Integrity, which is driven by the conviction of its founder, journalist Charles Lewis, that our political system is corrupted by secret wealth. In kleptocracies like Russia, that is plainly true, everyone knows it, and these leaks won’t change it. But in Iceland? That just seems ridiculous. In Canada, too — where the two biggest LuxLeaks gotchas involved tax avoidance by the government-owned Public Sector Pension Investment Board and government-favoured Bombardier. Wealthy people aren’t the problem. Corrupt people are.

But when people and companies use legal means to minimize taxes, that’s not corrupt or greedy or unfair, it’s playing by the rules. If we really want to keep more cash here, it won’t happen by trying to lock it up, but by keeping taxes competitive and saving everyone the cost and trouble of resorting to Panamanian lawyers and Caribbean accountants. In the meantime, whatever estate-planning methods law-abiding people are taking advantage of are entirely none of our business.

THE PANAMA PAPERS HAVE ALL THE JUICY INGREDIENTS TO GET

JOURNALISTS IN A LATHER.