7 ms·

Do you believe all ethical behavior should be codified in law, or just taxes?

by Sebguer 5y ago

the-dude 5y ago
What is ethical about paying taxes? Genuinely curious.
- dave5104 5y ago
  Taxes pay for all sorts of things in society. They pay for childhood education, they build roads, they pay for services like fire departments. If you don't pay taxes, then it wouldn't really be fair for you to be sending your kids to public schools, driving on roads to get around, or calling the fire department when your house is burning down, since you haven't contributed anything to their upkeep.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    So the people earning $20k per year who don't pay any taxes shouldn't get to send their kids to public schools?
    - nate_meurer 5y ago
      That is pretty obviously not what the parent is talking about. The context here is tax avoidance, i.e., avoidance by those financially able to pay. This has nothing to do with those whom the government has exempted due to limited financial means. Policy debates aside, I don't think many people will seriously argue such people have an individual ethical responsibility to pay taxes.
      - imgabe 5y ago
        If the government exempts you from paying taxes for low income that’s ok, but if the government exempts you from taxes for performing some kind of behavior they want to incentivize (like reinvesting company profits instead of paying them to shareholders) or structuring your company in a certain way, then you’re supposed to ignore that exemption and pay taxes anyway?
        nate_meurer 5y ago
        You're leaving out the part where corporations lobby relentlessly and effectively for the tax loopholes that best suit them. The structure and implementation of corporate taxes in the USA strikes me as needlessly complicated and corrupt, and I think corporate influence over the tax code is deeply unethical in many ways. At the same time, I wouldn't tell any individual or company that they're ethically obligated to forgo tax relief that's legally available to them. These two things are not in contradiction.
        imgabe 5y ago
        > corporate influence over the tax code is deeply unethical in many ways. It is problematic in that corporations have a lot more resources to bring to bear than the average person does. I don't find it unethical though. People have a right to express their concerns to the government and advocate for their interests, even if those people group themselves together into a legal entity such as a corporation. It would be more unethical to single out certain groups of people and say "everyone else is allowed to talk to the government and advocate for their interests, but you are not". Edit to add: It's the government's job to listen to everybody's concerns and balance the interests of different groups against each other. If we're unhappy with the job they're doing, we should elect a different government that will do a better job, not just silence groups we don't like. They are not passive elements in this who are just helplessly acted on by outside forces.
        nate_meurer 5y ago
        > everyone else is allowed to talk to the government and advocate for their interests, but you are not In practice, this is exactly the problem with revolving-door politics and regulatory capture. > we should elect a different government that will do a better job Agreed, and I would add that one of the most important functions of journalism like the OP is to inform the voters about these situations.
        sarakayakomzin 5y ago
        >I don't find it unethical though. People have a right to express their concerns to the government and advocate for their interests, even if those people group themselves together into a legal entity such as a corporation. People still have the power to do so individually, but a corporation isn't democratically organized.
  - alfl 5y ago
    For example, given that Google successfully litigated the Oracle Java API copyright case in the public court system, it seems that it gains advantages from public institutions. Simple reciprocity indicates that they should support institutions from which they benefit. Mutatis mutandis for, eg, roads so that employees can get to work, etc.
    - leephillips 5y ago
      But the employees pay taxes on their salaries. And Google’s corporate profit is taxed through taxes on dividends imposed on shareholders. The only tax that Google can evade is the double taxation on profits that will be taxed again when distributed. Although it is true that this tax rate is lower than income tax.
      - andromeduck 5y ago
        Just like with income taxes - it doesn't change the tax wedge at equalibrium but it feels better and that's what's important. It's like going to a store where everything is eternally 40% off.
      - alfl 5y ago
        Google has never paid a dividend. “Double taxation” refers to taxation post distribution not prior (source: I was a corporate tax accountant). Finally, “evasion” is illegal. “Avoidance” is a legal tax strategy.
  - mindvirus 5y ago
    Those taxes also pay for guns and missiles and much worse stuff. Is it ethical to pay for these things? The point that the parent is making is that there's a legal obligation to pay taxes, but it's not an ethical one - the government says what you owe, and you pay that. It's muddied by companies lobbying to set the laws, but I would have to agree paying taxes the laws say you owe is not an ethical question.
  - gher-shyu3i 5y ago
    > Taxes pay for all sorts of things in society. They pay for childhood education, they build roads, they pay for services like fire departments. What's the government doing by just collecting its citizens hard earned money? It should also invest in companies and other ventures and make its own money. It also has natural resources (oil, natural gas, etc.) at its disposal. Only if those are not enough can it ask its citizens to pitch in.
- megablast 5y ago
  You are paying for what you use. You think it’s ethical to use something and someone else should pay for it?? Or don’t you use roads, police, education, services, etc..,
  - smabie 5y ago
    I mean, not everyone uses the same things at the same amount.
  - abeppu 5y ago
    Let's also bear in mind that you can benefit from something without "using" it. I once talked to a guy who was furious that his property taxes funded public schools b/c he didn't have kids. But ... I think we'd all be worse off if there were no public schools and there was an illiterate underclass. I don't have a car and rarely drive on highways, but I have no idea where my groceries would come from if public roads were not present. I don't expect to collect social security, but I pay into it with the knowledge that all my elderly family members collect it. On the other hand, by paying our taxes, we Americans maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, and the largest and most elaborate military on the planet. So ... not all of what we pay for is "good".
- romwell 5y ago
  > What is ethical about paying taxes? Genuinely curious. What's ethical about playing in a poker tournament and paying the entry fee? Just curious. If you are getting rich in this country, taxes are paying for what enabled you to get rich in the first place: the human capital.
- abeppu 5y ago
  One quite popular and compelling family of ethical theories is utilitarianism, wherein "ethical" roughly means "resulting in the greatest happiness and well-being for all". Taxes and the public infrastructure and spending they support are clearly tied up in the well-being of most if not all in society. Taxes paid or not paid by corporations presumably impacts prices to customers, returns to investors, the success, failure or extent of public programs, and future decisions of taxes levied against individuals. How are taxes _not_ a thicket of ethical issues? However, I think a really ambiguous question is whether we should actually care about _corporate_ taxes over questions like treating capital gains income on the same footing as wage income. One expects that when corporations don't pay taxes, their shareholders eventually reap those savings as capital gains income ... so isn't it eventually taxed? I'm assuming here that only large multinationals engage in this sort of scheme; if there were a whole economy among rich individuals who always push their transactions through Bermudan-Irish shell companies, then perhaps it might never get taxed at any rate?
ergocoder 5y ago
No. However, paying tax is hardly an ethical matter. Am I unethical to choose standard deduction because it reduces my tax more than choosing itemized deduction? No? Yes? Maybe?
- nwienert 5y ago
  Do you think media / social media shaming companies for performing elaborate tax dodges helps or hurts put pressure for political action?
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    No idea. But it doesn't seem to help much. For example, many Dems shout "tax billionaires" for years. This rallies a lot of people. "Yeah!!! Let's tax them more" we all chant. Then, when Dems is elected, they are raising tax on salaried employees who earn more than 400k a year. (Not sure if they has gone through with it yet) I didn't know I was categorised as a billionnaire.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      I suspect people think about wealth on a log scale - in my mind $90 billion and $100 billion are basically the same number despite being rather different. Thinking in terms of orders of magnitude - $400k is a lot closer to $1,000k than the US median income of around 40k. Politics isn't about precise language. They just mean wealthy people. I thought they were pretty up-front about that.
      - jokethrowaway 5y ago
        That's quite ingenuous. It's of course easier to charge more taxes for moderately wealthy employees who don't have a clever tax setup and may need to. Really rich people with clever tax setups will just move out and you'll get no more revenue.
    - mLuby 5y ago
      One of only two Independent senators in Congress shouted "tax billionaires" for years, then when he didn't win the presidency, the billionaires just carried on unmolested.
fny 5y ago
Taxes area already codified in law, so it makes sense for the targeted behaviors to also be codified.
voidfunc 5y ago
One view is that the only ethics that really matters is what the law says is legal. Laws are derived by the people and encode their ethical permissibility within them.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Is that your view? Is it a particularly common view? Otherwise, why is it worth discussing?
whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
Paying a fair amount of taxes definitely has a big ethical component to it, AND the laws around it probably ought to be changed, but that doesn't imply that they should be changed strictly because of the ethical reasons. Specifically, collecting a reasonable amount of taxes is key to the function of governments as they're set up. It would be unethical to sell somebody a car that secretly has no motor, but ethics isn't the only reason cars need motors.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It is worth noting that what is "reasonable" and who owes it is one of the largest pieces of the work of a government.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  What's "fair share"? This keep getting repeated without any quantification.
  - nraynaud 5y ago
    In France it’s codified at the constitutional level, it’s a varying tax rate (ie marginal tax rate with slices)
- insert_coin 5y ago
  Taxes long ago stopped being the main way governments fund themselves. If taxes were about financing the government there would just be one tax called the-cost-of-government-tax and that's it. There would be no need to tax everything you do, and at different rates and on some days but not others, but when the moon is full on tuesday you pay double except if you lived on 72nd street during 2008... Taxes are about control, about influence, and about corruption. The loopholes are there becasue someone put them there, they are not hidden. The tax-code is so complex because someone made it that complex, someone doesn't want it to be easy.
imgabe 5y ago
Paying taxes has nothing to do with ethics. It is the government's job to set the tax rate and tell you how much you owe. It's not like "you are legally obligated to pay this much, but there is an ethical obligation to add another X% as well"
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Charging taxes is unethical and a violation of the non aggression principle. I pay taxes because the alternative is fines and eventually jail. That's theft, that's coercion. The less taxes you pay the more power to you - and I'd appreciate if you shared how.
- Sebguer 5y ago
  Living up to your account name with this hilarious response!
  - dang 5y ago
    Comments like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. You've done it more than once recently, and we want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes discussion noticeably crappier. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do you believe all ethical behavior should be codified in law, or just taxes?

the-dude 5y ago

What is ethical about paying taxes? Genuinely curious.

dave5104 5y ago
Taxes pay for all sorts of things in society. They pay for childhood education, they build roads, they pay for services like fire departments. If you don't pay taxes, then it wouldn't really be fair for you to be sending your kids to public schools, driving on roads to get around, or calling the fire department when your house is burning down, since you haven't contributed anything to their upkeep.
- imgabe 5y ago
  So the people earning $20k per year who don't pay any taxes shouldn't get to send their kids to public schools?
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    That is pretty obviously not what the parent is talking about. The context here is tax avoidance, i.e., avoidance by those financially able to pay. This has nothing to do with those whom the government has exempted due to limited financial means. Policy debates aside, I don't think many people will seriously argue such people have an individual ethical responsibility to pay taxes.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      If the government exempts you from paying taxes for low income that’s ok, but if the government exempts you from taxes for performing some kind of behavior they want to incentivize (like reinvesting company profits instead of paying them to shareholders) or structuring your company in a certain way, then you’re supposed to ignore that exemption and pay taxes anyway?
      - nate_meurer 5y ago
        You're leaving out the part where corporations lobby relentlessly and effectively for the tax loopholes that best suit them. The structure and implementation of corporate taxes in the USA strikes me as needlessly complicated and corrupt, and I think corporate influence over the tax code is deeply unethical in many ways. At the same time, I wouldn't tell any individual or company that they're ethically obligated to forgo tax relief that's legally available to them. These two things are not in contradiction.
        imgabe 5y ago
        > corporate influence over the tax code is deeply unethical in many ways. It is problematic in that corporations have a lot more resources to bring to bear than the average person does. I don't find it unethical though. People have a right to express their concerns to the government and advocate for their interests, even if those people group themselves together into a legal entity such as a corporation. It would be more unethical to single out certain groups of people and say "everyone else is allowed to talk to the government and advocate for their interests, but you are not". Edit to add: It's the government's job to listen to everybody's concerns and balance the interests of different groups against each other. If we're unhappy with the job they're doing, we should elect a different government that will do a better job, not just silence groups we don't like. They are not passive elements in this who are just helplessly acted on by outside forces.
        nate_meurer 5y ago
        > everyone else is allowed to talk to the government and advocate for their interests, but you are not In practice, this is exactly the problem with revolving-door politics and regulatory capture. > we should elect a different government that will do a better job Agreed, and I would add that one of the most important functions of journalism like the OP is to inform the voters about these situations.
        sarakayakomzin 5y ago
        >I don't find it unethical though. People have a right to express their concerns to the government and advocate for their interests, even if those people group themselves together into a legal entity such as a corporation. People still have the power to do so individually, but a corporation isn't democratically organized.
- alfl 5y ago
  For example, given that Google successfully litigated the Oracle Java API copyright case in the public court system, it seems that it gains advantages from public institutions. Simple reciprocity indicates that they should support institutions from which they benefit. Mutatis mutandis for, eg, roads so that employees can get to work, etc.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    But the employees pay taxes on their salaries. And Google’s corporate profit is taxed through taxes on dividends imposed on shareholders. The only tax that Google can evade is the double taxation on profits that will be taxed again when distributed. Although it is true that this tax rate is lower than income tax.
    - andromeduck 5y ago
      Just like with income taxes - it doesn't change the tax wedge at equalibrium but it feels better and that's what's important. It's like going to a store where everything is eternally 40% off.
    - alfl 5y ago
      Google has never paid a dividend. “Double taxation” refers to taxation post distribution not prior (source: I was a corporate tax accountant). Finally, “evasion” is illegal. “Avoidance” is a legal tax strategy.
- mindvirus 5y ago
  Those taxes also pay for guns and missiles and much worse stuff. Is it ethical to pay for these things? The point that the parent is making is that there's a legal obligation to pay taxes, but it's not an ethical one - the government says what you owe, and you pay that. It's muddied by companies lobbying to set the laws, but I would have to agree paying taxes the laws say you owe is not an ethical question.
- gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  > Taxes pay for all sorts of things in society. They pay for childhood education, they build roads, they pay for services like fire departments. What's the government doing by just collecting its citizens hard earned money? It should also invest in companies and other ventures and make its own money. It also has natural resources (oil, natural gas, etc.) at its disposal. Only if those are not enough can it ask its citizens to pitch in.
megablast 5y ago
You are paying for what you use. You think it’s ethical to use something and someone else should pay for it?? Or don’t you use roads, police, education, services, etc..,
- smabie 5y ago
  I mean, not everyone uses the same things at the same amount.
- abeppu 5y ago
  Let's also bear in mind that you can benefit from something without "using" it. I once talked to a guy who was furious that his property taxes funded public schools b/c he didn't have kids. But ... I think we'd all be worse off if there were no public schools and there was an illiterate underclass. I don't have a car and rarely drive on highways, but I have no idea where my groceries would come from if public roads were not present. I don't expect to collect social security, but I pay into it with the knowledge that all my elderly family members collect it. On the other hand, by paying our taxes, we Americans maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, and the largest and most elaborate military on the planet. So ... not all of what we pay for is "good".
romwell 5y ago
> What is ethical about paying taxes? Genuinely curious. What's ethical about playing in a poker tournament and paying the entry fee? Just curious. If you are getting rich in this country, taxes are paying for what enabled you to get rich in the first place: the human capital.
abeppu 5y ago
One quite popular and compelling family of ethical theories is utilitarianism, wherein "ethical" roughly means "resulting in the greatest happiness and well-being for all". Taxes and the public infrastructure and spending they support are clearly tied up in the well-being of most if not all in society. Taxes paid or not paid by corporations presumably impacts prices to customers, returns to investors, the success, failure or extent of public programs, and future decisions of taxes levied against individuals. How are taxes _not_ a thicket of ethical issues? However, I think a really ambiguous question is whether we should actually care about _corporate_ taxes over questions like treating capital gains income on the same footing as wage income. One expects that when corporations don't pay taxes, their shareholders eventually reap those savings as capital gains income ... so isn't it eventually taxed? I'm assuming here that only large multinationals engage in this sort of scheme; if there were a whole economy among rich individuals who always push their transactions through Bermudan-Irish shell companies, then perhaps it might never get taxed at any rate?

ergocoder 5y ago

No. However, paying tax is hardly an ethical matter. Am I unethical to choose standard deduction because it reduces my tax more than choosing itemized deduction? No? Yes? Maybe?

nwienert 5y ago
Do you think media / social media shaming companies for performing elaborate tax dodges helps or hurts put pressure for political action?
- ergocoder 5y ago
  No idea. But it doesn't seem to help much. For example, many Dems shout "tax billionaires" for years. This rallies a lot of people. "Yeah!!! Let's tax them more" we all chant. Then, when Dems is elected, they are raising tax on salaried employees who earn more than 400k a year. (Not sure if they has gone through with it yet) I didn't know I was categorised as a billionnaire.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    I suspect people think about wealth on a log scale - in my mind $90 billion and $100 billion are basically the same number despite being rather different. Thinking in terms of orders of magnitude - $400k is a lot closer to $1,000k than the US median income of around 40k. Politics isn't about precise language. They just mean wealthy people. I thought they were pretty up-front about that.
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
      That's quite ingenuous. It's of course easier to charge more taxes for moderately wealthy employees who don't have a clever tax setup and may need to. Really rich people with clever tax setups will just move out and you'll get no more revenue.
  - mLuby 5y ago
    One of only two Independent senators in Congress shouted "tax billionaires" for years, then when he didn't win the presidency, the billionaires just carried on unmolested.

fny 5y ago

Taxes area already codified in law, so it makes sense for the targeted behaviors to also be codified.

voidfunc 5y ago

One view is that the only ethics that really matters is what the law says is legal. Laws are derived by the people and encode their ethical permissibility within them.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Is that your view? Is it a particularly common view? Otherwise, why is it worth discussing?

whatgoodisaroad 5y ago

Paying a fair amount of taxes definitely has a big ethical component to it, AND the laws around it probably ought to be changed, but that doesn't imply that they should be changed strictly because of the ethical reasons. Specifically, collecting a reasonable amount of taxes is key to the function of governments as they're set up. It would be unethical to sell somebody a car that secretly has no motor, but ethics isn't the only reason cars need motors.

shadowgovt 5y ago
It is worth noting that what is "reasonable" and who owes it is one of the largest pieces of the work of a government.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gher-shyu3i 5y ago
What's "fair share"? This keep getting repeated without any quantification.
- nraynaud 5y ago
  In France it’s codified at the constitutional level, it’s a varying tax rate (ie marginal tax rate with slices)
insert_coin 5y ago
Taxes long ago stopped being the main way governments fund themselves. If taxes were about financing the government there would just be one tax called the-cost-of-government-tax and that's it. There would be no need to tax everything you do, and at different rates and on some days but not others, but when the moon is full on tuesday you pay double except if you lived on 72nd street during 2008... Taxes are about control, about influence, and about corruption. The loopholes are there becasue someone put them there, they are not hidden. The tax-code is so complex because someone made it that complex, someone doesn't want it to be easy.

imgabe 5y ago

Paying taxes has nothing to do with ethics. It is the government's job to set the tax rate and tell you how much you owe. It's not like "you are legally obligated to pay this much, but there is an ethical obligation to add another X% as well"

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Charging taxes is unethical and a violation of the non aggression principle. I pay taxes because the alternative is fines and eventually jail. That's theft, that's coercion. The less taxes you pay the more power to you - and I'd appreciate if you shared how.

Sebguer 5y ago
Living up to your account name with this hilarious response!
- dang 5y ago
  Comments like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. You've done it more than once recently, and we want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang 5y ago

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes discussion noticeably crappier. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html