Something about the word “offshore” drives many reasonable people into paroxysms of stuttering, incoherent rage. The locution is hazy, to be sure. Bermuda insurance companies, Cayman banks, Bangladeshi garment factories are all part of the evil offshore empire that is, by many accounts, ruining a once great nation. Jamaican resorts, Italian shoe manufacturers, and Australian wineries seem to be exempt from the dreaded label, even though by providing Americans their vacations, footwear, and Saturday evening buzz they deprive good old American labor of customers just as surely.

Anti-offshore forces say that it is not competition they object to, only unfair competition. This sounds plausible, but it is not true. Until it joined the euro, Italy’s export success was dependent on serial devaluations of its currency – much the same trick that our Congress has been trying to get China to stop. If you think the waiter who hands you an icy pina colada as you stare contentedly at that impossibly blue ocean works in the same conditions as the one who takes your order at the local Marriott – well, you’ve gotten a little too much sun.

There are real downsides to offshore manufacturing, most notably that we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the 55-year-old steelworker whose earning potential just went from $75,000 a year to $20,000 when his company relocated to Korea. But the argument most commonly advanced is that Third World workers, who have been liberated from subsistence agriculture by sweatshops, would be better off if we forced their companies to improve the inferior wages, benefits, and working conditions that are the only competitive advantage they have. Too often, this argument comes from American activists whose bellies, bulging over their belt loops, testify that they have no grasp of the kind of abject poverty that sweatshops eliminate.

Arguments against financial offshoring – the flow of money from countries with transparent banking systems to those in which bank secrecy laws allow citizens from other lands to hide their money from the prying eyes of their government’s tax police or criminal investigators – have more merit. There is no question offshore accounts are used by all manner of criminals, from drug lords stashing their profits to wealthy husbands hiding assets from their spouse’s divorce attorneys. This sort of “offshoring” is the subject of William Brittain-Catlin’s new book, “Offshore” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages, $25).

Mr. Brittain-Catlin hates offshoring with a rare passion. Since offshoring ranks very low on the list of things I think our government should be worried about, I looked forward to engaging his argument. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one. Instead, I found a litany of offshore’s putative offenses, strung together in a prose style heavily redolent of undergraduate comp-lit classes. He spends pages on a superficial survey of Marx, Kant, and Rousseau, even though the ideas presented are either irrelevant or so obvious (there is an inherent tension between the community and the individual!) that they need no philosophic pedigree behind them.

Ostensibly, his purpose is to establish the philosophic forebears of the bourgeois revolution that, he argues, brought us into the brave new world of offshoring. But his arguments are gloriously inapposite – the attempt to hide money from the government by stashing it beyond the state’s grasp dates back to approximately one hour after the invention of government, not the 18th-century rise of the bourgeoisie. His grasp of the subject is superficial, and his choice of works odd: why Kant, Rousseau, and Marx, but not Smith, Locke, and Mill?

Worse, Mr. Brittain-Catlin’s style is painfully, self-consciously ponderous: “From the ironfisted criteria of what regulates knowledge, Kant turned, in his ‘Critique of Practical Reason,’ to the moral realm of man’s hidden nature of freedom. This was where man’s secret, on-shore interior would be opened up and revealed as man’s rule-bound gift from God.” What does this have to do with offshore financial dealings? It is hard to escape feeling that the real point of this force-fitted philosophizing is to let us know that William Brittain-Catlin got a B+ in Philosophy 150: The Enlightenment through the Modern Era.

The book is not all high-toned nonsense. Much of it attempts to tell the history of the rise of the Cayman Islands as an offshore haven, though the author’s venomous hatred for his subjects makes me leery of trusting him as a source. He attempts, for example, to imply that the Cayman Islands somehow have been (or will be) devastated by the rise of offshore banking in recent decades, even though reading between his own lines makes it clear that the citizens of Cayman are vastly better off since the flood of offshore money began deluging their little nation.

It is reasonable to question whether they are benefiting at the expense of citizens of other nations, stuck with the crime – and the lower tax revenues – that offshoring makes possible. But while I have no doubt that terrorists use offshore accounts, this is a trivial overall portion of the business. The reason for this is simple: There are not that many well-funded terrorists, or even drug lords, and there are other means, such as boats and briefcases, to move money across borders.

Al Qaeda has also used airplanes and rail systems to terrible effect, but that does not prove the inherent wickedness of our transportation network. To argue that secret offshore accounts are an unmitigated evil requires assuming government is always good – a rather heroic leap, given 20th-century history. Offshore accounts may let Al Qaeda move money, but they also provided the means for Jews to escape Hitler’s Germany with more than the shirts on their backs.

Mr. Brittain-Catlin never really attempts to prove that offshore accounts are bad, or even that on balance they are harmful enough to justify vigorous action. Instead, he begs the question, interspersing irrelevant digressions with unflattering snapshots: Here is Enron, which used offshore vehicles; there is Osama bin Laden; yonder is Long Term Capital Management. The conclusion we are supposed to draw is obvious. But Mr. Brittain-Catlin gives us no reason to believe it is correct.

Ms. McArdle last wrote in these pages on Stephen D. Levitt’s “Freakonomics.”