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Privacy should be considered a right. Just because someone wants privacy doesn't make them guilty of money laundering. When there is a reasonable expectation

Privacy should be considered a right. Just because someone wants privacy doesn't make them guilty of money laundering. When there is a reasonable expectation of foul play, subpoenas are the appropriate route. A lot of damage can be done by exposing people's financials. They become targets to predatory litigation and other forms of crime.

everdev 8y ago
It sounds like tax evasion was a motivating factor in needing the privacy. > Other correspondence points to the primary reasons many clients were using offshore structures. > One Uruguayan financial planner commented: "…the main purpose of this type of structure has been broken: confidentiality". > Another intermediary wrote: "… the names of our customers have been known by the authorities of their countries. Thanks to Mossack, customers have to pay incomes taxes."
jackvalentine 8y ago
I agree with you for the most part about privacy. But I want to balance that right to privacy against the additional 'powers' you get when using a company to conduct business. We imbue companies with a lot of benefits depending on their form like limited liability, different taxation arrangements and we should be able to identify the principals of those companies publicly.
losteric 8y ago
Privacy is a right. Hiding behind corporations is not a right, otherwise the implication is the right deserve more rights than the rest of us. Anything that enables tax evasion, subversive campaign influence, or otherwise inhibiting the general public's fundamental rights should be banned.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- losteric 8y ago
  whoops: otherwise the implication is the rich deserve more rights than the rest of us.
- Steve44 8y ago
  > Anything that enables tax evasion .... should be banned Do you know the difference between evasion and avoidance? Tax evasion already is illegal. Paying your car mechanic in cash and it not going through the books is evasion and is illegal. Tax avoidance is not. When you used to buy the under £15 DVDs from Jersey you were avoiding paying the VAT you should have been but was perfectly legal.
ebikelaw 8y ago
Privacy is for things you do in private. Forming a corporation is necessarily public because a corporation is a creation of the state, and therefore everyone's business.
- bcheung 8y ago
  Why is it everyone's business? Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware, and New Mexico are states and they all have varying degrees of privacy options for corporations by design. Only public companies should be required to be public IMO. So would you also say that self-employed people shouldn't have the same rights as employed people? Unless everyone should have all their financial and employment records public then this is a double standard. I don't think employees would be too happy if everyone can see where they worked, for how long, and how much they made at every job.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    Self-employed people by definition are not working for a corporation. If they worked for a corporation, they would be employees, even if they also were the sole owner of that corporation, as the corporation is a separate legal person.
    - bcheung 8y ago
      Many self-employed people use corporations as their chosen entity structure.
      - vidarh 8y ago
        Then they're not self-employed. They're employed by their corporation. They may be "self-employed" in a social sense, but they'd not legally be considered self-employed in any jurisdiction where I know how it works. E.g. I used a limited company in the UK to employ myself. For the purposes of everything relevant, I'm an employee of that company, as well as a director, and the sole owner, and the relevant records are publicly available because I chose to form a corporation. Socially I might have been "self employed" but legally I'd explicitly chosen not to be because the benefits I got from that outweigh the downsides. If I didn't want to reveal that information, I had the choice to operate as a sole proprietor without forming a company.
vidarh 8y ago
Corporations are a collective fiction. They're entities that only exists because society agrees that they exist because they are generally considered beneficial. But they do not have an existence absent a legal system imbuing them with rights and responsibilities. As such, society sets the rules, and those rules are a trade-off between the substantial powers that comes from the various features available, such as creating a corporate veil, maintaining an existence independent of its owners, or limiting liability, and the responsibilities we expect them to comply with partly to reign in those powers, partly to protect owners from each other, and transparency is an important part of both most places in the world. If you don't want your personal financials exposed that way, then don't use a corporation for them. Their purpose is not to shield your personal finances. If your jurisdiction does not provide adequate privacy protections for individuals then that is a separate problem - for corporations the lack of privacy most places is an intentional feature.
- golergka 8y ago
  > because they are generally considered beneficial Thanks, but no. I don't want to live in a society that's ruled according to other people's ideas of what benifits them and find this idea completely immoral and alien. As a person, I want to be able to do whatever I very damn please, benificial or no, as long as it doesn't infringe other person's freedom.
  - jasonvorhe 8y ago
    That's not how the world works, sorry to break it to you.
    - golergka 8y ago
      How world works is neither static nor universal. There are political forces acting out of utilitirian ethics, trying to benifit the whole society - but thankfully, there are also forces fighting against it, and very successfully, at times.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    The very point of a corporation is that it is a legal fiction that society agrees to honour. Without negotiating those terms, why should society as a whole honour it if you decide to invent new rules and apply them to your new fictional entity to shield you from liability for example? What you are suggesting does infringe on other persons freedoms in that your unilateral corporation only has meaning if you force others to act as if it exists. Put another way: If I decide I'm King of my own kingdom, and insists that as king I can dismiss any debt I incur, why should society accept my fantasy to the detriment of other members of society? If I insist that I can incorporate some new class of corporation not subject to the rules of society, I'm no different than a madman proclaiming his own fictional kingdom - it has no real existence unless I negotiate that existence and the rules governing it with society around me (one such alternative might be to simply accept one of the existing forms of business).
Taniwha 8y ago
The fiction that a company is a person is a strange American idea that is not true elsewhere in the world
- vidarh 8y ago
  Most countries have laws that treats certain types of companies as a legal person in most respects. How far it extends varies, but it's certainly not unusual for companies to have extensive rights. The very name "corporation" hints at this (from lating "corpus"), and the idea of a corporation predates the existence of the US by more than a millennium.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

everdev 8y ago

It sounds like tax evasion was a motivating factor in needing the privacy. > Other correspondence points to the primary reasons many clients were using offshore structures. > One Uruguayan financial planner commented: "…the main purpose of this type of structure has been broken: confidentiality". > Another intermediary wrote: "… the names of our customers have been known by the authorities of their countries. Thanks to Mossack, customers have to pay incomes taxes."

jackvalentine 8y ago

I agree with you for the most part about privacy. But I want to balance that right to privacy against the additional 'powers' you get when using a company to conduct business. We imbue companies with a lot of benefits depending on their form like limited liability, different taxation arrangements and we should be able to identify the principals of those companies publicly.

losteric 8y ago

Privacy is a right. Hiding behind corporations is not a right, otherwise the implication is the right deserve more rights than the rest of us. Anything that enables tax evasion, subversive campaign influence, or otherwise inhibiting the general public's fundamental rights should be banned.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
losteric 8y ago
whoops: otherwise the implication is the rich deserve more rights than the rest of us.
Steve44 8y ago
> Anything that enables tax evasion .... should be banned Do you know the difference between evasion and avoidance? Tax evasion already is illegal. Paying your car mechanic in cash and it not going through the books is evasion and is illegal. Tax avoidance is not. When you used to buy the under £15 DVDs from Jersey you were avoiding paying the VAT you should have been but was perfectly legal.

ebikelaw 8y ago

Privacy is for things you do in private. Forming a corporation is necessarily public because a corporation is a creation of the state, and therefore everyone's business.

bcheung 8y ago
Why is it everyone's business? Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware, and New Mexico are states and they all have varying degrees of privacy options for corporations by design. Only public companies should be required to be public IMO. So would you also say that self-employed people shouldn't have the same rights as employed people? Unless everyone should have all their financial and employment records public then this is a double standard. I don't think employees would be too happy if everyone can see where they worked, for how long, and how much they made at every job.
- vidarh 8y ago
  Self-employed people by definition are not working for a corporation. If they worked for a corporation, they would be employees, even if they also were the sole owner of that corporation, as the corporation is a separate legal person.
  - bcheung 8y ago
    Many self-employed people use corporations as their chosen entity structure.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      Then they're not self-employed. They're employed by their corporation. They may be "self-employed" in a social sense, but they'd not legally be considered self-employed in any jurisdiction where I know how it works. E.g. I used a limited company in the UK to employ myself. For the purposes of everything relevant, I'm an employee of that company, as well as a director, and the sole owner, and the relevant records are publicly available because I chose to form a corporation. Socially I might have been "self employed" but legally I'd explicitly chosen not to be because the benefits I got from that outweigh the downsides. If I didn't want to reveal that information, I had the choice to operate as a sole proprietor without forming a company.

vidarh 8y ago

Corporations are a collective fiction. They're entities that only exists because society agrees that they exist because they are generally considered beneficial. But they do not have an existence absent a legal system imbuing them with rights and responsibilities. As such, society sets the rules, and those rules are a trade-off between the substantial powers that comes from the various features available, such as creating a corporate veil, maintaining an existence independent of its owners, or limiting liability, and the responsibilities we expect them to comply with partly to reign in those powers, partly to protect owners from each other, and transparency is an important part of both most places in the world. If you don't want your personal financials exposed that way, then don't use a corporation for them. Their purpose is not to shield your personal finances. If your jurisdiction does not provide adequate privacy protections for individuals then that is a separate problem - for corporations the lack of privacy most places is an intentional feature.

golergka 8y ago
> because they are generally considered beneficial Thanks, but no. I don't want to live in a society that's ruled according to other people's ideas of what benifits them and find this idea completely immoral and alien. As a person, I want to be able to do whatever I very damn please, benificial or no, as long as it doesn't infringe other person's freedom.
- jasonvorhe 8y ago
  That's not how the world works, sorry to break it to you.
  - golergka 8y ago
    How world works is neither static nor universal. There are political forces acting out of utilitirian ethics, trying to benifit the whole society - but thankfully, there are also forces fighting against it, and very successfully, at times.
- vidarh 8y ago
  The very point of a corporation is that it is a legal fiction that society agrees to honour. Without negotiating those terms, why should society as a whole honour it if you decide to invent new rules and apply them to your new fictional entity to shield you from liability for example? What you are suggesting does infringe on other persons freedoms in that your unilateral corporation only has meaning if you force others to act as if it exists. Put another way: If I decide I'm King of my own kingdom, and insists that as king I can dismiss any debt I incur, why should society accept my fantasy to the detriment of other members of society? If I insist that I can incorporate some new class of corporation not subject to the rules of society, I'm no different than a madman proclaiming his own fictional kingdom - it has no real existence unless I negotiate that existence and the rules governing it with society around me (one such alternative might be to simply accept one of the existing forms of business).

Taniwha 8y ago

The fiction that a company is a person is a strange American idea that is not true elsewhere in the world

vidarh 8y ago
Most countries have laws that treats certain types of companies as a legal person in most respects. How far it extends varies, but it's certainly not unusual for companies to have extensive rights. The very name "corporation" hints at this (from lating "corpus"), and the idea of a corporation predates the existence of the US by more than a millennium.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]