OF MORE THAN THEORETICAL INTEREST. Today's Breaking Views in the New York Times suggests the tax code keeps liquidity tied up overseas.

On its own, an international tax amnesty won’t resolve the credit crisis or repair the economy. But given the limited effectiveness of some of the more expensive government programs, it’s hard to see how it would hurt.

The basic idea would be for Congress to legislate a window through which American companies could bring home dollars held abroad without paying corporate taxes of some 35 percent.

This would provide a fillip of liquidity to businesses, especially as even some of the most stable and solvent companies have been forced to pay huge premiums to obtain financing. Combined with the tax savings an amnesty would generate, companies would have greater resources to invest in research, development, capital spending and jobs.

That sounds a little like the Talmudic theft amnesty and the offering of a reward for the return of stolen goods, and a little like an immigration amnesty, which regular readers have encountered before.

Referees raise the objection that an amnesty is the source of a time-inconsistency problem, in that the granter of the amnesty is creating an incentive for people to misbehave (library fines and parking tickets come to mind) in anticipation of a future amnesty.

So too, with the tax amnesty.

There’s also the message another tax break would send. If companies believe that American authorities will grant them similar forbearance every few years, they wouldn’t bring money back home during good times. That would not just deprive the government of tax revenues, it would distort corporate behavior.

Distortion is a loaded term. Price signals distort business behavior all the time. But we call it allocative efficiency under some conditions, and in other conditions we evaluate the tradeoffs.

Still, finding a fair and efficient way to repatriate cash during a crisis could foster an economic recovery at relatively low cost to American taxpayers. One compromise might be to offer companies an amnesty if they agree to maintain certain employment levels for a set period of time.

That policy generates a different sort of social waste. But failed companies generate little in the way of jobs or of taxable income for owners and workers.