7 ms·
Norway Shrugged (2024)
- lensecat 1mo agoThe teenagey reference to Atlas Shrugged, a book that hails selfishness as the highest human virtue, coupled with the sloppy writing makes me highly suspicious of the competence of the author. Good riddance for Norway I guess.
- grebc 1mo agoI’d guess they’re not a native english speaker. Not sure it’s good riddance that they’re turning away their own citizens over such a small, likely unnecessary(?), tax.
- mountainb 1mo agoSort of like how the medieval world relied on a small class of aristocratic landowners who loved riding fast horses and killing each other, the postmodern world relies on a small class of people from all walks of life who will work much harder than usual to make more money than they need, operating large enterprises to solve various material problems of other people that they don't really need to be solving, paying tax on those enterprises that they could otherwise avoid if the were not working so much.
- awakeasleep 1mo agoThats a real big difference in how socialists vs ryandian people view the world. The Ayn Rand philosophy holds that the people at the top are working hundreds or thousands of times harder than the rest of us. The modern socialist view is completely contradictory, where most of the people at the top are supposed to be doing even less than a construction worker, but they're rich because of the return on capital or the right to extract some sort of rent.
- fwipsy 1mo agoThis is an empirical question. 10 seconds of googling suggests CEOs work about 60 hours/week average: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/harvard-study-what-ceos-do-all-day.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/harvard-study-what-ceos-do-a... so harder than the average employee, but I'm not sure by what measure anyone believes they work 100x harder. Perhaps the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO is 100-1000000x the average worker's productivity, or even more. I suspect the real disagreement is: does that justify paying a CEO 10-100000x more than the average worker, even if they only work 1.5x as hard? From the perspective of a company it may be worthwhile, but I can see how some people might feel that's a little unfair.
- grebc 1mo agoThe problem with both views is it ignores lived experience. Everyone knows people at the top get paid more, even in socialist/communist societies this is the case. Now whether this is because of birth privilege, good social connections, politicking, actual hard work. It's pretty well a constant that's held across time & differently structured societies. I guess what I'm trying to say here: there's always people jockeying for position. Pretending we're in some sort of utopia won't give the average person a good experience. Second. While the hard work is most definitely over exaggerated, it's not uncommon that hard working people usually end up better off then not hard working people. There's also the saying/belief that people make their own luck. And I am firmly in the camp that luck, whether it's made on their own accord or blindly stumbled into, is a probably the biggest unspoken factor because it takes away from narratives of self-made etc.
- grebc 1mo agoYour reply is postmodern.
- throwaway8980 1mo ago[dead]
- PunchTornado 1mo agoWhat are the train references all over the text? is it because of the tax?
- tom_ 1mo agoI assume it's because trains play a part in Atlas Shrugged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
- PunchTornado 25d agoloved it
- throwaway8980 1mo ago[dead]
- throw-293973747 1mo agoSlop. Feels like a child onesided complaining and detached from a regular reality. You are not a fugitive, just because you are expected to contribute to society.
- cjs_ac 1mo agoLet's revisit the very first sentence of the article. > Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral, amassing over 100 million views on X. There's contributing to society, and there's receiving demands for more wealth than you possess. If you can't make a moral distinction between the two, then, frankly, I don't know how to explain it to you - this is one of those things that you should understand by the age of ten or so.
- zahlman 1mo ago> more wealth than you possess Net income != wealth.
- cjs_ac 1mo agoIt’s not a once-off tax bill; it’s every year.
- zahlman 1mo agoGood, productive wealth is expected to accumulate value over time, for example by being invested in someone else's equity or in a worthwhile business venture. If you're sitting on capital that isn't doing that, you've functionally taken it out of the economy, and a well-designed system punishes that.
- cjs_ac 1mo agoInvested capital is not guaranteed to make returns within a tax year. Taxes on capital gains are morally right, but wait until the gain has been realised before levying the tax.
- jt2190 1mo agoIs the Norwegian government’s theory that a modern company might never realize their gains, and avoid taxation indefinitely, and thus this is a forcing mechanism to extract some tax revenue?
- LanceH 1mo agoI don't know how a company could avoid all taxes. They say that Amazon does, but that's only the corporate income tax, surely they are paying billions in payroll, property, energy, and other taxes.
- aaomidi 1mo agoProperty is an easy one: Don’t tax us and we’ll bring jobs to your area.
- culi 1mo agoGood Jobs First has tracked $11b in public subsidies to Amazon so far https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/ https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/ You have to take that into account and look at the NET of what we've paid Amazon vs what they've paid us
- LanceH 1mo agoStop throwing subsidies. Easy fix without a wealth tax. There are a plethora of taxes that companies pay, but a tax on existence is just awful in so many ways. Make zero dollars this year? You lose a percent of the company -- congrats. There is a middle ground: Make using the securities of the company as collateral a taxable event. If it's good enough to back a loan, it's wealth, realized.
- overgard 1mo agoOh god, this guy instantly lost credibility to me for mentioning Atlas Shrugged.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- culi 1mo agoHow narcissistic do you have to be to come up with a title like this about yourself? It reminds me of that study that found that people who serve in executive roles for prolonged periods of time develop a sort of brain damage where their "mirroring" neural process becomes impaired. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c...
- iuhoiuh 1mo ago[dead]
- loldot_ 1mo agoWhat all these people fail to mention is that at about the same time as the increase in wealth tax, another tax rule was made stricter. Before nov. 29 2022, you could take your unrealized profits abroad for five years to reset your cost basis for the realized gains tax. Meaning you could essentially spend five years to get rid of your tax burden. This tax amount is significantly larger than the wealth tax. And many of these 100 people moved before that.
- lukewarm707 1mo agothe author founded dune.com which is a crypto onchain data company. there is a focus on ethereum, solana, tron, stablecoins, prediction markets and the like. the viral tweets critizing the wealth tax are by elon musk, marc andreessen, paul graham and alex svanevik (also an onchain data founder). certainly what they have in common here is that they would stand to lose some wealth from the wealth tax!
- unsupp0rted 1mo agoThe other thing they have in common is building large scale organizations that do difficult things, bring value to millions of people and employ thousands
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Analemma_ 1mo agoInvoking Atlas Shrugged and "the government is punishing the most productive, wealth-generating members of society!" when you run a shitcoin startup is hysterical. Musk is a scumbag but at least he builds real rockets and electric cars. The author of this article lets people arbitrage monkey JPEGs and has the gall to complain about being taxed on it.
- culi 1mo ago[flagged]
- decimalenough 1mo agoTL;DR: Norway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. "Wealth" here includes the book value of private companies, which presents cash flow problems for founders of startups with high paper valuations (like the author, who founded unicorn Dune Analytics). I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.
- culi 1mo agoNot to mention that the general findings from Norway's wealth tax is that it works. A few millionaire's leave but the benefit far outweighs the cost of some capital flight https://www.reuters.com/business/norways-wealth-tax-trades-millionaires-equality-2025-11-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/norways-wealth-tax-trades-m... I still prefer Warren's proposal in the US which only proposed a tax above a net worth of $50m. The biggest criticism of wealth taxes is the massively complicated added bureaucratic burden of measuring everyone's wealth. Only about 0.14% of USians have a net worth above $50m.
- unsupp0rted 1mo agoThank goodness it’s $50 million because if it were a quarter of that then $174,000/year salaried senator Elizabeth Warren, worth $12 million, would be liable too.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- culi 1mo agoIt's only a tax on wealth above $50m. If she ever reaches that level of net worth, I highly doubt she'd have trouble paying a 2% tax on it. The 1935 Revenue Tax was essentially a wealth tax and it brought great levels of prosperity as well as continued entrepreneurship
- zahlman 1mo ago> facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income…. I still don’t know how I was supposed to pay the tax …Perhaps by realizing a portion of the gains and handing over the resulting wealth?
- Kon5ole 1mo ago>Perhaps by realizing a portion of the gains and handing over the resulting wealth? That means the state forces you to sell your company if people start to believe in it. Why can't they instead tax you once you do realize the gains of your own free will?
- scotty79 1mo agoOf course not. You can borrow money if you prefer that. They don't force you to do anything except paying what you owe.
- Kon5ole 1mo agoThis is what can happen: You start a co and have a million shares. Some guy buys a share for a thousand bucks, which means you get classified as a billionaire. Then the state says "Hey pay us ten million of that billion". When you start to sell your shares, you discover that the first guy was insane and nobody wants your shares. That 1000 bucks is all you have. And the state goes "Better borrow for that ten million you owe us" Of course the normal situation is that a company makes money and shares don't collapse in value - but what I describe can 100% happen exactly like that. It's a kafkaesque dystopian nightmare that should not be possible in a democracy IMO.
- altairprime 1mo agoSo, let me see if I understand this right: They took an investment of 70M at a valuation of 1000M, in a country that has a well-known 1% tax of valuation, but they failed to write payment of that tax into the funding papers and fled the country to dodge a 10M annual tax bill. To their complaint: Norway is exceedingly hostile to investments that do not result in Norwegian economic investment beyond the borders of a given business. The 1% tax on virtual wealth is explicitly targeting theoretical unicorns to ensure that VC funding is taxed. Here, the first year’s effective tax would have been 10M owed out of 70M invested, at 14%. Whether that’s excessive or not for an investment is worth discussing in the context of Norway’s normal corporate tax rate, 22-25%, which they do not do. I shouldn’t have had to do this math: their post, if it’s seriously intended to influence economic policy, should have at minimum laid out these figures. To their emotions: Were they not consulting with an accountant and a lawyer when they accepted the investment? Did they knowingly accept the investment and begin planning their exit from the country immediately? Is this a planned marketing campaign that uses taxation outrage to generate free PR for their company among taxation-hostile audiences that are more likely to pay a cryptocoin investment product? Given the data-free post and the apparent naïveté of their founder when faced with investment and taxation in Norway, when the focus of the business on providing investment advice — either this business deserves to collapse due to its founder’s incompetence, or this post is a honeypot trap for extracting PR wealth from the cryptocoin faithful. The post presents no new arguments against Norway’s valuation tax that weren’t already hashed out at length when it was first imposed, so I decline to give them free PR by engaging with their outrage. ps. While I largely disagree with Rand’s views, I am not unfamiliar with them. The implicit but unstated framing of their cryptocoin investor product as a peer of Reardon steel or Taggart Transcontinental here is laughable. No product is produced that stands above and apart from its peers, Rand would label their target customers as ‘moochers’, and their post is a coarse mockery of the impassioned monologues of Atlas. Their flight to Switzerland is no silent quitter abandonment of their enterprise, and they certainly would not be invited to the Gulch before the collapse.
- peter-m80 1mo agoBullshit article
- Kon5ole 1mo agoMagazines all over the world talk about the wealth of business owners as if it is equivalent to the wealth of say sports stars or musicians, who get paid millions to their bank accounts. Forbes and other finance magazines create top lists and bio stories presented entirely as if the valuations of businesses are the same as actual money. When Amazon shares go up or down a few percent overnight it's reported in the media as if a convoy of trucks has dumped dollar bills at Bezos' mansion. "Bezos made xx millions per minute". Spreading such misinformation everywhere for decades can't be good, and it seems Norway has fallen victim to it.
- scotty79 1mo ago> Norway's entrepreneurs are now indeed disappearing from society. In the past two years alone, a staggering 100 of Norway's top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50% of that group's wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses. This sounds like amazing success. Now no one has to worry about those people using their money to command Norway's significant resources to implement their stupid ideas. Money is not a resource. It's IOU from the society to the guy with money. Pushing the rich out of the country is letting someone else pay for those IOUs with their work and resources. If you think it's a loss because those people might have great ideas because they got some in the past that made them rich, it's usually not the case. To land on the very top you need very significant amount of luck. And luck is something that you get case by case. So they have about as good ideas as next 10000 people that didn't have as much luck. But the blast radius of the stupid ideas of those on the very top is huge because of how much money they accumulated. Pushing them out of the country is a huge benefit.
- Kon5ole 1mo ago>Now no one has to worry about those people using their money to command Norway's significant resources to implement their stupid ideas It doesn't though. It only prevents people who actually live in Norway from implementing "stupid" ideas. Foreign companies are not taxed on valuations, so the effect of this is just that all employers in Norway will eventually become foreign companies. How is that a benefit?
- scotty79 1mo ago> all employers in Norway will eventually become foreign companies. > How is that a benefit? If they employ people in Norway you can tax them on that. If they sell in Norway products or services you can tax them on that. If they purchase infrastructure you can tax them on that. If they own any infrastructure in Norway you can tax the ownership. If they rent anything, you can tax renting. If they borrow Norwegian money, you can tax that. If they lend to Norwegians you can tax that. That's a lot of benefit. Pretty much all of the benefit of hosting any company, domestic or foreign in Norway if you don't tax the capital itself. What you can't tax the companies on is profit because it's trivially concealable. It's even better if they are foreign as they have lower political capital because they can't cry their tears out to the Norwegians to have lower taxes. Pushing rich people out of the country and taxing them along the way is the best thing that might happen. And the money collected can be reinvested into infrastructure and consumers so that foreign companies have a reason to do stuff there.
- gardnr 1mo agoThis article is from 2024. They can defer this tax now. [1] > High income with short work days, free healthcare, free daycare, free education and beyond. If the author doesn't value these for the people around them then perhaps he should move somewhere else. 1: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/tax-deduction-card-and-advance-tax/defer-business-asset-wealth-tax/ https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/tax-deduction-ca...
- t0bia_s 1mo agoIt's not free. It's payed from taxes.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- robocat 1mo agoWhen your application to defer the tax is granted, payment is deferred for three years. Once the three years have passed, you'll receive an invoice stating the amount that you owe, including interest. That just makes the problem far worse.
- readthenotes1 1mo agoThe author addressed some of his concerns with how tax dollars were being spent in the article. And he predicted your reply as well.
- kayo_20211030 1mo ago[flagged]
- LanceH 1mo agoAfter looking at the posts here, are you being critical of those like it or those who can't get beyond hating it (and maybe discuss the actual point of the article)?
- techgnosis 1mo agoAtlas Shrugged references didn't do this guy any favors
- hingler36 1mo agoI guess I'm in the weird position of being a leftist who is generally against wealth taxes. Taxing non-liquid wealth like this requires the government to be able to accurately assess the value of these assets and that's an unrealistic burden IMO. I would rather address the "Buy, Borrow, Die" paradigm from other angles, like restricting the classes of assets one can borrow money against to force liquidation and therefore be subject to a traditional capital gains tax instead. That way the market takes care of the problem of pricing the asset and society can impose a tax on that valuation.
- zahlman 1mo ago> Taxing non-liquid wealth… I would rather address the "Buy, Borrow, Die" paradigm… like restricting the classes of assets one can borrow money against to force liquidation The point is that to justify the concentration of capital, the company should be doing well enough to tank the tax. If they can borrow money against the equity then that gives them liquidity, and they can use it to pay a wealth tax; and if they can't repay the loan (presumably because their equity didn't appreciate to a point where they could re-negotiate the loan terms) then there's your forced liquidity.
- hingler36 1mo agoI see your point, but in this scenario how do you handle the problem of levying an accurate tax? I suppose we could rely on banks to value assets instead of the government, but since the banks are the ones giving out the loans to pay the tax this feels a bit circular
- geoka9 1mo agoBanks are actually pretty good at valuing assets. They don't want to overvalue because that's their collateral. And lowballing will make the borrower choose another bank.
- like_any_other 1mo ago> The point is that to justify the concentration of capital Why does that need additional justification, beyond investor confidence? And why does "justification" take the form of paying money? That's not any kind of moral justification, it's just an indulgence. > the company should be doing well enough to tank the tax. Saying it should be doing well enough now to tank a tax based on estimated future earnings requires that a lot of otherwise unnecessary assumptions about access to financing and revenue timelines hold. It's all just throwing a bunch of extra stress at entrepreneurs when they're most vulnerable, instead of waiting for when their labors bear fruit. Since the state is extremely able to endure that wait, it all just comes across as malice.
- like_any_other 1mo agoSo what's the point of taxing unrealized gains specifically? Why not wait until the gains are realized, tax them then, and still collect on average the same tax income? This would result in the same yearly tax income for the government, except in the years immediately after implementing or increasing unrealized gains taxes. Is it just to force entrepreneurs to sell more stock and get more loans, as a gift to the financial sector? Edit: On second thought, taxing unrealized gains results in lower tax income - the financial sector will take its cut, and that cut has to come from somewhere.
- atmavatar 1mo agoBecause many of the wealthiest individuals de facto realize their gains in the form of collateral for loans that allow them to live without ever realizing their gains from the perspective of the tax code. If you do well enough, you never have to pay taxes on stock holdings. The very first sentence of TFA gives it away: Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral Many who are in the position to control how their compensation is doled out (board members, C-level) will often take it exclusively (or nearly so) in stock, specifically so they never have to pay taxes on it. Famously, several have taken $1/year incomes - e.g., Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, while Elon Musk didn't even bother with the charade and took $0/year. * Side bonus: in the US, corporations paying out performance-based compensation like stock get additional tax breaks, so it's not just the executives which win the taxation game while doing this.
- like_any_other 1mo ago> de facto realize their gains in the form of collateral for loans that allow them to live without ever realizing their gains from the perspective of the tax code. Can you explain how this works? I have my wealth in stocks, I use those stocks as collateral for a loan. To pay back this loan, I have to either get money from somewhere, or hand over the collateral to the bank. Let's say "get money from somewhere" is taxed (to avoid circular reasoning), so that leaves trade loan collateral for loan cash, which is on net no different than selling the stocks. This is not taxed? And wouldn't it be infinitely easier to close that loophole, than taxing the estimated profit for the next N years, which is what unrealized gains tax amounts to?
- hexapus 1mo agoHere's my solution: Make being a billionaire illegal. That's it. It's incumbent upon asset-holders to remain under the limit. It's up to them how close to the line they wish to tread. No one becomes a billionaire ethically...no one produces that level of value, and absolutely no one needs that much money. And we have evidence that it literally breaks your brain when you attain that level of wealth. It's only possible to attain through exploitation. If you are found to hold a billion dollars in assets, you go to prison and forfeit all of your assets, so it's up to them to manage their assets accordingly. Give it away, pay your workers more, distribute it however you want, but a single person cannot be allowed to control that much capital - full-stop. If you flee the country, any assets you leave behind are forfeit and seized. You will not be allowed to retain the wealth you accumulated on the on the backs of taxpayers and labourers...it will be forcefully redistributed for the public good. For any country that does this, extreme wealth disparity will be eliminated. If there are countries that allow billionaires exploit the working class and public infrastructure, then they can go build their fortunes there. Equitable, civilised countries will outlaw it. Billionaires only exist because we allow them to. Someone with less than a billion will be just fine, and can enjoy a reasonable, moderate amount of wealth in peace.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo ago[dead]
- decimalenough 1mo agoThe blog author is the founder of a unicorn and thus (assuming they hold a controlling stake) a billionaire on paper. Should your sanctions apply, and how does that work when their only significant asset is the company shares?
- hexapus 1mo agoI can't think of a reason he should be exempt. Every billionaire is a billionaire "on paper".
- Kon5ole 1mo agoIt's unethical to make a million by controlling a drug someone needs to survive or bribing politicians. But it's not unethical to make a billion by writing a popular app, website, book, movie or performing songs. So the amount is irrelevant, it's the actions that matters, when it comes to ethics. You have no jurisdiction over other countries, so the country allowing billionaires will end up with the largest companies in any industry, and your small companies will not be competitive. Dystopian end to your country follows. This isn't easy. Billionaires are often the result of the basic wealth creation of society, which we don't want to sabotage. Amazon employed thousands before Bezos became the richest guy in the US. We want successful companies that employ thousands of people under good conditions. The more such companies the better, even if each of them creates a billionaire or two in the process. I think we should allow people to become as wealthy as they can, but ensure that it has to happen through ethical methods. No corruption, rackets, cartels or other shenanigans. No matter how much money you have you can't buy any loopholes. Of course easier said than done but I don't see another way that can possibly work out well.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]