Most of your points are strawman arguments to be fair. People complicate these matters far more than they actually are. How do I know? Because what you pay in

Most of your points are strawman arguments to be fair. People complicate these matters far more than they actually are. How do I know? Because what you pay in taxes has been public information in my home country Norway for many decades. None of the problems you mentioned have been an issue. As hard as it may seem, Norway values BOTH transparency AND privacy more than the US. So there are lots of laws which protect your privacy. 1) It does not state HOW you make your living. Just roughly how much you pay in taxes and how much you earn. The details are left out. 2) There are always systems in place to help protect citizens with special needs for more privacy. 3) Companies in Norway cannot pass around information about you to each other or store information about you it does not strictly need. It is not like the US where companies can en masse huge amounts of data about customers and sell it to each other. Information gathering for commercial purposes is quite restricted. 4) As a rule in Norway, you are informed about people obtaining information about you. E.g. if a company does a credit history check on me, I will get a mail stating exactly what company credit checked me and word by word, what information they where provided. The credit check info leaves out a lot of the details that would be available in the US. Same goes if somebody checks your taxes and income. You are informed of who makes the check and what info they have been provided. I hope this gives an idea of how you can in fact embrace greater transparency while at the same time promote stronger privacy laws. I can remark that Norwegian politicians and CEOs are among the lowest paid in the world despite Norway being among the richest countries in the world. I think our long tradition for transparency is a contributing factor to that. Not so fun to be greedy when it is obvious to everyone.