It's the wrong angle. One should not look at corporations as the moral saviours. As Supreme Court Judge Learned Hand once said:
"Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing 851*851 sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."[1]
Rather, it is the governments of the world we should be going at if we want this behaviour to change. But then again, it is always easier to find a fat scapegoat with a shiny appearance.
> It's the wrong angle. One should not look at corporations as the moral saviours. [...] Rather, it is the governments of the world we should be going at if we want this behaviour to change.
Let us pretend that corporations have no influence over laws and governments, and merely play a game they had no hand in designing.
Let us try something impossible in order to avoid questioning our faith in corporations.
In reality, it's impossible to build a thriving society on the expectation that no one should act morally. We should definitely hold our corporations accountable for being dodgy and exploit rather than report perceived problems.
> we should be doing is insulating the government from outside influence.
We should be insulating it from the influence of money, not of voters. The influence of voters is the foundation of democracy and legitimate government.
Just because politicians stop creating opportunities for mega-corps and wealthy individuals to gain unfair advantages in the economy doesn't stop them from writing all legislation.
Corporations/wealthy individuals can't exploit power which doesn't exist. Adding more complexity and protections to prevent this has repeatedly failed and usually just creates more loopholes, the solution is simplification of new laws and reduction of old poorly written laws (adding more complexity has historically been a one way street in modern government: https://i.imgur.com/pe64eNd.png).
And if lawmakers can't write regulations, legislation, or tax policy which doesn't give particular people/organizations an advantage, by side effect or directly, then they shouldn't write them at all - or just accept that there will be people who sidestep it.
But it's ridiculous to say this will prevent politicians from governing. Yes, it will limit the types of legislation and force them to consider the full implications, but that's a good thing.
This is why people support things like basic income and flat tax. Removing complexity, bureaucracy, and direct government involvement in picking winners/losers. Everyone knows the devil is in the details when you're trying to circumvent a system or take advantage of it.
Tangential: interesting how, through using a weird vertical scale, the image you linked to weakens its own point. I suppose if the Y axis was consistent, it wouldn't look as if tax law expansion slowed down significantly in recent times.
Agreed, I hate logarithmic graphs, as they can be highly manipulative, but this one was even worse as it would be more persuasive if it didn't oddly divide the years. I did in fact look for a better one before I linked to it but I couldn't find one. I should make my own version one day...
Some people are playing by a more effective set of rules. You were sold a moral paradigm to stuff government coffers and bought it without even questioning how public services could be funded. Others see the moral relativity and aspire to adapt and do.
Oh, but you weren't sold a moral paradigm to stuff corporate coffers? Your argument rests on the premise that you're a free thinker and everyone else is brainwashed. This conceit seems to be very common among libertarians.
Governments are bound by the international market of other governments. They have to balance their taxation morality claims with incentivizing investment to have anything to tax at all.
They’ve missed that balance by a long shot. Oops.
Some places have attractive laws that attract investment. Some people lobbied for those specific laws and wrote them themselves. Think about how that happens. I would do the same as soon as some area breaks away into a new sovereign territory, separatists are too emotional to think about corporate income tax rates, ask for 0% and you’ll get it.
Napoleon says "no". You do that and then one day 300000 people show up with guns. The lesson of modernity is that citizen armies beat all other forces hands down every time; contractors may be incredibly skilled but at the end of the day they are not fighting for the future. This was what the Prussians found and the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Taxation isn't about morality, it's about functionality. It's about economic efficiency and social management.
If we decide corporations have no obligation to be moral or decent, they naturally will behave as we expect. If we expect and demand (and punish the absence of) more, we can get more. Corporations are made up of people, and people are fully capable of not committing rampant constant fraud.
Spending thousands of dollars to avoid their moral tax obligations instead of paying is in my view fraud and corruption; the fact that it is possible with an army of accountants and massive resources dedicated to tiny loopholes is really of no importance when we weight the ethical or moral judgements of these actions: if you spend millions on lawyers to devise a clever loophole that lets you murder someone legally you are still a murderer. There's a (bad) argument to be made that for consistency's sake we cannot prosecute you under the current laws, but there's no argument that you're not a monster.
Refusing to pay taxes is stealing from the poor (and the general public) who rely on government services; you are destroying the roads, parks, annihilating schools and universities, preventing people from getting healthcare they need to survive, stealing from children, the homeless, the elderly and the disabled, helping criminals by defunding the police and helping burn people and property by defunding fire departments.
If your job is to find tax loopholes for corporations, you are committing fraud even if our current legal system is written by people who think fraud is okay so long as it's a CPA on behalf of a massive corporation doing it. The fact that some judges have decided this is okay does not mean that it actually is.
Do you leave the standard deduction on the table? Because this is what you’re asking corporations to do: not take the opportunities to reduce tax liability that we provide them.
Both. Simpler (potentially higher, but just more enforcable) tax would be good. On the other hand it's not about standard deductions - if an accountant comes to the corp with "we figured out this crazy loophole, we'll call it double Irish with a Dutch sandwich", then yeah, I think the corp should step back. (and the tax office should charge them for taking a piss)
You do. You can choose to not live in society. Go live in the jungle, or buy a raft and jump onto the sea; no one will follow you to tax you.
Of course, you won't do this, cause you like living with people. You like living in cities but cities cannot run without roads, piers, planning, etc. And you like being safe, knowing if people hurt you or take your stuff they'll be punished, if your house catches on fire it'll be turned off, and if you're out late at night the sidewalk will be lit so you can find your way back home.
You have the choice, it just doesn't seem like one because not living in society is just not worth it.
That is the choice of giving up my money, or dying - during a robbery.
I am talking about the choice I have in any free marked: where to spend my money and what to get in exchange. I have none of that when it comes to over half of my revenue: my taxes.
You have a huge amount of choice in your taxes; you can vote, run for office, and advocate for political positions. You have zero choice in your economic situation (if you are 99% of people) since most financial choices are made for you by large companies that you have zero stake in or control over.
Is there a difference between someone pointing a gun at your head and saying 'your money or your life' and a company that buys all the water in your region and withholds it saying 'your money or your life'? No.
Have you voted? How much did your vote count? Did you run for office? How much change did you manage to bring?
In a company you can also buy shares, vote at board meeting or get a job in and change it from the inside.
But that is not the freedom of choice I am talking about. That is a fake choice since it is too difficult, requiring you to change your entire life.
What I am talking about is the simple choice of free market: choosing who to give your money and for what services.
I do not intend to give up the government services, I just want to be able to transparently select the provider and not have to buy them in bulk, bundled together.
>But that is not the freedom of choice I am talking about. That is a fake choice since it is too difficult, requiring you to change your entire life.
What I am talking about is the simple choice of free market: choosing who to give your money and for what services.
Sure -- but at the same time, I bought a product at walmart five years ago, then I decided not to buy there anymore. Why hasn't walmart changed its business practices? I think you're right to say my vote means nearly nothing, but you are missing the point that my purchase means even less. Votes are at least distributed one vote one person; if you accept the financial scheme for decision making you are literally just giving all the power to people who are currently wealthy explicitly.
>What I am talking about is the simple choice of free market: choosing who to give your money and for what services.
This is a meaningless choice that only the wealthy can make in the first place.
>I do not intend to give up the government services, I just want to be able to transparently select the provider and not have to buy them in bulk, bundled together.
I'm not sure what you mean here -- you want government services, but you also want to transparently select the provider. For government services, the government is the provider.
You guess wrong. My country is crappy run by a corrupt, inept government. My tax money have the worst ROI of all my spendings.
Have you actually tried to change citizenship? I did it once (and then back). It is a long, gruesome process where you change a monopoly with another. It takes years and it's not always an option. Try giving this "advice" to the people of Cuba, Venezuela or N Korea.
>>That is the choice of giving up my money, or dying - during a robbery.
Why do you believe living in the jungle will result in dying? Our ancestors did it, and many people manage to do it today.
It wouldn't be easy of course, especially if you're so used to your creature comforts that you lack basic survival skills, but it's definitely not a death sentence.
There are no jungles around where I live. Just forests. And they all belong to the government.
My grad parents tried living off their land, but during a time when the government raised the taxes to impossible levels they couldn’t pay and the government came down on them - hard. They lost it all but survived. Others weren’t so lucky.
>>There are no jungles around where I live. Just forests. And they all belong to the government.
You can live on government land. You just have to move at least 25 miles every 14 days. So basically a nomadic lifestyle. It's doable. People have done it and still do it today.
If you want the benefits of a country that has decided to charge people to live there, then you have to pay - same if you want the benefits of membership of a club.
All those places have taxes. Low taxes, but they have them.
What you don't seem to understand is that I am not arguing against taxes themselves. Or even high taxes. Of course I would pay lots of money to partake in civilized society and its services.
What I want is free market competition for how my taxes are spent and those services received. Because with the current monopoly the government has no reason to improve in any way and instead it takes my taxes and uses them as they see fit - mostly to ensure their reelection.
It takes tremendous amounts of money and gives me horrid services. And they have the gall to tell me that this is the only way and I don't need or deserve any other choice! That, in my book, is stealing.
Imagine please that there was a smartphone tax. You'd pay a certain amount a year and you'd get a single, government issued smartphone. Compare that with the current free-market solution. Which one is better, which one would you prefer?
Now apply that thinking to all other government services. That is my whole point.
Antactica or boat on ocean is zero tax. Places like Dubai, Kuwait, etc all report zero direct personal taxes. There are 190 countries, and far more sub-country areas with differing tax policies (including in the US). That's an enormous choice.
I'm with BT for my ISP. I have a free market, I can move to providers from A&A to Zen. I don't have the ability to change what BT provide.
Lets take your smartphone example. I don't like what Apple have done in recent IOS versions (or mac laptops), so I can use an android phone or a lenovo laptop, just as I can move to Dubai, or Antarctica.
I have more choice in where to live than in ISPs or Phones.
What you are asking for is vigiliantism and extralegal actions against corporate persons and the people that make up these corporations. There's a lot of reasons why those things are considered pretty bad.
I also find it interesting that you say:
"Corporations are made up of people, and people are fully capable of not committing rampant constant fraud."
What are our local, state, and federal governments made up of, then - the same organizations that don't close loopholes and set tax code properly to serve the greater interest? Are these organizations not made of people?
>What are our local, state, and federal governments made up of, then - the same organizations that don't close loopholes and set tax code properly to serve the greater interest? Are these organizations not made of people?
Yes, they are. But going out of your way to hire thousands of attorneys to find loopholes is obvious explicit fraud. Writing a tax code and possibly missing something is a natural human error. "Corporate persons" do not exist -- they are a legal fiction invented to shield corporate criminals from liability.
Also, why do you think I have low expectations of my government? I expect them to try their best to prevent fraud just as I expect corporations to do their best to avoid committing it.
I suppose it's easier to pressure governments to change what's going on when we have journalists willing to tell us what's going on.
When it comes to reporting information obtained from "secrecy jurisdictions", I think a standard of "if it's not illegal to report, it's OK to report" is reasonable.
After all, that's the same standard you're advocating for managing your tax affairs.
There is a misunderstanding: Daphne Caruana Galizia was the leading journalist on the Panama Papers in Malta.
The main source for the PP revelations was the Süddeutsche Zeitung (same guys as this time) and lot of other people were involved all over the world; Caruana Galizia was only one of them, not "the" person.
As far as I know, no reporter from the SZ, the Guardian and other ICIJ members was harmed after the PP revelations. Malta is a very shady place, very close to Southern Italy for political culture.
Panama Papers and the ICIJ are a very large effort. But yes, a Maltese reporter, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who worked on Panama Papers (about 80 reporters in total) was assassinated by car bomb in Malta last month.
> It's the wrong angle. One should not look at corporations as the moral saviours.
It's too late. You're arguing a return to the past, "money is just money, corporations are just doing what's in their self interest."
That's still the dominant ideology, but it's on the wane.
It will be replaced when cash is replaced. Cash will be replaced by bonds. I won't pay McDonalds in cash for a burger, I will pay them in a bond specifically to be disbursed according to how I want the money to be disbursed. Yes more burgers. Yes advertise all you want. No, this money may not be spent on rainforest destruction. If they misuse funds, the bond will be broken and they'll be subject to penalties. Intentionality will reach forward and back across the disbursement boundary. Cash will die.
Capitalists have always talked about cash as if it had the color of a bond, "vote with your dollars" and that kind of thing. And repeat purchases do start to act like a bond. If I'm a large repeat customer and I complain, the business is likely to respond.
But that setup, where the bond is just implicit in the revenue stream, inevitably caters to the wealthy. If you're a big fish, your cash is treated as a bond. If you're a small fish, it's treated as cash.
Digital currencies will allow us to actually pay for small transactions with microbonds, giving much more power to small purchasers.
How are you going to persuade large vendors to accept your microbonds? It's an interesting take, but we've had competitive currencies in the past and they have their own problems. I'd like to persuaded of this, links are fine too.
McDonald's doesn't want to deal with your nonsense. If you don't have proper fiat currency to give them they'll tell you to go buy your food somewhere else.
"wrong angle"? :) sure, maybe we should focus on why only 0.001% of the population can play this pay-less-taxes-with-a-shell-corporation-in-a-tax-haven game...
Well, it's simple: the more effort you put at it, the better your results in this game. Effort == money (through using services of specialists), and so the more money you can spend on it, the more you can avoid taxes.
Sounds unfixable in general; the only thing you can adjust is severity of the phenomenon (e.g. less complexity in tax laws == less loopholes to exploit == cost/benefit curve on tax evasion grows slower).
But corporations do like to paint themselves as moral and fighting for you! Another thing is why people believe in it...
All in all, there are many things that are not illegal to do, but definitely immoral. Such tax schemes sure are immoral in my eyes, I'm a hard-core capitalist, but no way your average Joe stands a chance at "optimizing" taxes. People need to call out these companies more, but it's easy to deceive the people. Apple felt the clock has shifted and its beneficial to them and say supportive things of LGBT issues and people truly believe they are fighting for the average man.
> Such tax schemes sure are immoral in my eyes, I'm a hard-core capitalist, but no way your average Joe stands a chance at "optimizing" taxes.
This rather shows that the tax system is far too complicated, so that only really rich people can "afford" (i.e. pay the necessary apparatus of lawyers, tax experts etc.) to use the loopholes. Rather tell your government to radically simplify it with the long-term goal that one even can formulate "correctness proofs" that some kinds of loopholes simply do not exist etc.
You invoked morality. The moral calculus is pretty clear to me: I’ll take the gay loving advancer of technology over governments stealing money to use it to blow up people any day.
Apple has the moral high ground, and that ground is higher the less taxes they pay.
Remember military spending is far more than roads.
Between the strip mining to supply the factories, and the factory conditions in China that are Apple in everthing but name, Apple may still be able to claim a moral high ground over the government that keeps Guantanamo Bay still open, but that's not a very high bar.
Apple only exists because taxes - yes, including military spending - allows them to exist. You don't have high-tech corporations in failed states. Stable society, highly-educated people, solid economy - all of this is enabled and secured by a well-functioning state.
And the roads the parent commenter speaks of... remember Eisenhower's highway system was built as part of national defense.
And without military conflict over the last 1 million years, human evolution would not be something to be admired. But when we have in front of us the longest military conflict in US history being against loosely organized foot soldiers living in tents, something is clearly wrong.
If we look at how great thinkers had to tease out right answers from wrong--Tesla for example had a lot of wrong ideas and bad experiments, but eventually he came across brilliance.
The benefits we see here from military conflict all came from real competition, and the troubles we can see here come from a consolidation of power under a global plutocracy that is consolidating power across the globe.
No, government spending got us super expensive connections between a handful of universities. Free markets took that and brought it as the internet to our doors.
Military invented expensive microwave radar. Free markets turned it into $100 kitchen appliances.
The government put satellites on orbit at tremendous cost for military positioning system. Free markets put Waze driving directions on my phone.
Yes, we have a bunch of expensive things due to government spending. Imagine how many more we would've had and how much cheaper if free markets were allowed to create them...
Internet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together. Without the internet we'd have BIX, FidoNet, Compuserve, Prodigy, MCImail, RBBS, or any of innumerable other schemes to network computers.
Jet engines? Governments refused to fund jet engine development until they were confronted with FLYING jet aircraft. This happened in both England and Germany. The US government ordered Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and concentrate on piston engines.
You might want to think about what it was that, in a highly-competitive landscape of networking options, lead to TCP/IP and BGP succeeding where other options didn't.
I've just unearthed my copy of The Matrix, John S. Quarterman's exploration of "computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide". It was published in 1990, just on the cusp of the breakout of the Internet (there's a late 1990s revised edition I've not seen).
It covers a lot of ground. Not of much practical use at this point, but a phenomenal historical document: Layers & protocols, management protocols, administration. And the networks!
You could also ask why (privately developed) Ethernet, instead of the other LAN protocols like Token Ring. One possible answer is government is an elephant and has the power to push their standards - perhaps due to algore.
That's an interesting question, but is beside my point. My point is to counter the notion that without government funding, we wouldn't have a global network, that nobody would have connected computers together.
And I'll suggest that your response above points strongly at a probable explanation: the U.S. government as a single "consumer" in this case, was able to force standards adoption.
Hardly the first time that's happened. Look to the establishment of the US Bureau of Standards (by Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce), the standardisation of fasteners, plumbing, railroads, electrical components, and transmissions, among other elements. The US Navy's transport needs in Vietnam resulted in the marine shipping industry standardising on the "20 foot equivalent" standard cargo container (the concept itself had been kicked around for decades).
There are numerous other document, data, signage, fabrication, materials, commodity, etc., standards established by the US Federal (and at times, state) governments.
It's a very powerful role. One that seems lacking of the past two decades or so.
The thing is, in total war the military uses all resources—people, money, ideas. Without the World Wars, who knows how technology would've progresses on it's own—since we can't compare it's disingenuous to say it's only because of these wars.
But we know that many different networks were created. The idea we would not have a global network without the internet is false by inspection (FidoNet was global).
The code breaking machinery was not the internet. Besides, the code breaking machinery relied on tubes (and later, transistors) both developed by the free market.
"You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
The terms "capitalism" and for that matter "communism" are labels that have lost almost all meaning. The USSR was a dictatorship as is Russia today. "Capitalism" was a term coined by Karl Marx as a critique of 19th century industrial England. Calling yourself a "capitalist" is like calling yourself a "alienist". It's an archaic term and imprecise at best.
I believe you are misinformed. You're describing "communist dictatorship". There are other forms of Communism in the world. From the Israeli Kibbutz to the Mondragón Corporation, the gamut of communism as implemented is wide.
Whether they're enforced exactions of voluntary contributions is not the Court's call to make. Some people are happy to pay their taxes, recognizing them as the perfectly reasonable cost of living in a functioning civil society (which, not coincidentally, is seen as the basis of their security and prosperity).
Others, for whom this connection may not be so clear, take a more exploitative view of the public sphere, in which their own role is all take and no give. They may see taxation as forced extraction, but that view is hardly shared by everyone. Moreover, were they allowed to act on this view freely, the public sphere would surely collapse - which a clear majority clearly recognizes.
In this regard, tax law is no different from laws against, say, murder. Most people are internally resistant to the thought of killing others. But the law still exists because "most" isn't "all". In cases of extreme anti-social behavior, the few - if allowed to run riot - really can secure tyrannical domination of the many (classic example: the mob in Sicily).
Learned Hand was surprisingly never a Supreme Court justice. He's been quoted by the Supreme Court justices more than any other lower-level judge, however. He served mostly in federal appeals court.
The fact that she put money in an offshore investment fund doesn't mean she's avoiding UK tax. The same investment could be structured through a UK structure with the same tax outcome.
Let me be extremely critical here: there is moral judgement in the quote while it argues against that. That taxes would be enforced exactions, in lieu of laws, goes counter to the common moniker to follow the spirit of the law.
To follow the law by the letter might be a bare necessity eventually, that can't support the moral argument.
The essence of the quote is a warning of false analogy that's pretty much in line with a liberal capitalism, and also from analogy in law in general.
But it's not inline with a liberal rule reading, especially as unforseen cases were meant to be covered in hindsight.
Tax law is terribly verbose to not miss a cases, which is a good thing for the intention of giving everyone a fair warning so to speak, and it is frequently changed to cover it's bases.
If the comment really amounts to an attack on case law, I fully agree. And it's an understandable thought insofar he's in the position to have to sift through it the most, or at least a lot, I guess.
edit: only if the frequency of changes is not enough or not exact, for whichever reason, that might introduce impedance mismatch here and there.
Can we just bury this facile argument? Corporations spend a fortune on lobbying and enjoy huge asymmetrical advances. These facts are hardly obscure, and to wax pious without acknowledging their existence borders on bad faith.
"Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing 851*851 sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."[1]
Rather, it is the governments of the world we should be going at if we want this behaviour to change. But then again, it is always easier to find a fat scapegoat with a shiny appearance.
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=628482160657957... (last paragraph)