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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 hav
by mrleiter 9y ago
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.
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6284821606579578514 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=628482160657957... (last paragraph)
- Parcissons 9y agoThat fat scape-goat basically has made a market of law- where the lowest bidder wins the company of the scape-goat. Companys are the new governments. Deal with it.
- mjw1007 9y agoI 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.
- pohl 9y agoWasn’t the reporter behind the Panama Papers killed by a car bomb?
- dredmorbius 9y agos/the/a/ 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. ICIJ are now over 200 journalists. https://www.icij.org/blog/2017/10/investigative-malta-journalist-killed-bomb-blast/ https://www.icij.org/blog/2017/10/investigative-malta-journa...
- paranoia101 9y agoYah! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb...
- toyg 9y agoThere 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.
- cisanti 9y agoBut 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.
- rothbardrand 9y agoYou 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.
- gaius 9y agoMilitary spending got you the Internet, GPS, jet engines, microwave ovens and a million more things that you take for granted ...
- wallace_f 9y agoAnd 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.
- 9y ago
- pyrale 9y ago> 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.
- mempko 9y agoBingo. This a million Times.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoWhat exactly did land of opportunity mean to you? 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.
- anigbrowl 9y agoOh, 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.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoGovernments 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.
- 9y ago
- mtgx 9y agoWhich is more likely to "go after" the queen of England? The UK government, or the UK people? I would say the latter, which is why it's the correct angle in this case.
- charlesdm 9y agoThe 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.
- clamprecht 9y agoAka "don't hate the player, hate the game"
- anigbrowl 9y agoCan 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.
- pera 9y ago"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...
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWell, 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).
- wfo 9y agoIf 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.
- nickpp 9y agoRefusing to pay taxes is stealing?! I am afraid you have this backwards: taxes are simple robbery.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> 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.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoInteresting idea. You have resources talking about this in more detail?
- anigbrowl 9y agoHow 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.
- posterboy 9y agoLet 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.
- posterboy 9y agoon the other hand, because a judicial corrective can happen quicker with fewer peole involved, it has upsides, too.
- alexqgb 9y agoWhether 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).
- icelancer 9y agoLearned 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.