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Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

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Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#161

Post by literallycancer »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #56
charlesdm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoidance, not evasion. If you're a very frugal person, it seems pretty normal to hate taxes. No point in saving on everything, yet then throwing x% away in taxes (yes, I am aware taxes fund a lot of good things, but at the same time a lot of money is wasted -- I'm sure Kamprad thought he could better manage and deploy that money)

Please cut the ’avoidance, not evasion’ bullshit. This scheme is outright evasion, legalized by lobbying in Brussels against national law. You know that otherwise you wouldn’t care to point out this nuisance.

Blame the rich, extol the nation and sprinkle with some EU hate.

Guaranteed effect or your money back.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#162

Post by dsacco »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #131
dsacco wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not important when discussing ethical implication of not paying taxes in the context of HN. Legal definitions are not important for discussing ethical implications? This is a wildly unsubstantiated claim that you’re positing without any compelling argument behind it. What you’re saying is implicitly tantamount to saying a discussion of legislation is irrelevant in a discussion of ethics. Doing that literally dismis…

Have to disagree. Laws may have something like an ethical base, but only as a nod to practicality - people have to believe in them. They are pragmatic to the core. Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics?

> Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics?

So you’re not disagreeing then. We’re saying the same thing: legal definitions are relevant and should be included in discussion, but they do not have to be agreed with because are not intrinsically correct.

I didn’t ask the parent comment for agreement with legislation, I asked for acknowledgement in an ethical discussion because it’s relevant.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#163

Post by rectang »

charlesdm wrote: post #159
sooheon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The politicians will never bite the hand that feeds. The mega rich both write the laws and benefit from them, this does not excuse the behavior morally, only makes it legal on paper (which, apparently is enough for some of you).

But who is at fault here then? You can blame the wealthy all you want, but it would not be possible without the cooperation of politicians that are elected by the people.

Both parties are at fault, obviously. They are collaborators in a corrupt system which ordinary citizens do not have access to.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#164

Post by literallycancer »

rectang wrote: post #158
literallycancer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start a political party and fix it.

My activity in this realm has been to contribute to open source software, both as an author and as an administrator. I see it as a win-win-win for workers (the developers who write the code), their employers (who invest in open source as a superior product), and the software industry and society at large (through increased productivity and a better model for collaboration).

Anyone can benefit from OSS, corrupt individuals included. I'm not sure if that kind of action can help improve legislation or decrease the number of loopholes.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#165

Post by pc86 »

justin66 wrote: post #85
marmaduke wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an attribution for the quote?

Seriously, this takes 3 seconds to google.

And even less time not to type this meaningless and unnecessarily rude comment. My meaningless and unnecessarily rude comment, on the other hand, took quite a bit longer.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#166

Post by ChrisLomont »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #92
ChrisLomont wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why hoard so much? Nothing was hoarded. IKEA is a private company, and the founder likely held a lot of that ownership. He didn't simply grab people's cash and hide it in a box. To turn that ownership value into cash so he would not "hoard so much" would be to turn ownership (and hence direction) of IKEA over to others. To sell ownership would mean others would turn cash into ownership, so there's really no net gain…

By defintion, more than you need is hoarding. He could have distributed (read: invested via donations and grants) more sooner. Why wait til death? Unless, there's some personal "quirk" (e.g., hoarding) prevented him from doing so? As they say, ya can't take it with you. Why not go with your bag lighter? Why not go you're leaving with seeds planted and growing? Why risk some unforseen legal snafu? Etc.

>He could have distributed (read: invested via donations and grants) more sooner.

The only way he could have done that is to sell the company, and using your definition, as soon as the company was worth more than he needed personally, he would have to sell it to not be a hoarder.

I'm pretty sure in that case the company would never have grown to what it is, as there's ample studies showing that founders, who know a business, provide more growth than letting outsiders run a company, when averaged across all companies. I'd suspect this is the case for this person also.

So your plan would have resulted in less total worth provided to humanity.

And, as I pointed out above, the only way to realize that value is to sell ownership - so now you've removed some cash from someone else to get ownership, given that cash to this owner, for a net zero change in cash available for society, with a likely less value add over time. This is why these ideas do not work economically.

Warren Buffet is a good example of this - he was far better at allocating capital than most (perhaps anyone), and when he dies the world will see that worth transferred to charity. Had he constantly handed it over earlier to less efficient capital allocators, there would have been less growth, since others are likely far less capable than he was/is, and there would be less total for the planet.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#167

Post by matthewmacleod »

sooheon wrote: post #155
matthewmacleod wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the frustration, but I really think this is an important distinction to make. Evasion is solved by rigorously enforcing existing tax frameworks. Avoidance is solved by closing loopholes. They're two different problems—although they share some things in common—and they require two different solutions.

> I really think this is an important distinction to make [...] they require two different solutions. Agreed. The problem, and the source of the frustration, is that your average poster on hacker news (or average human being on earth) has 0% influence on either of the solutions. It is the mega rich who hold all the power, who have the resources, energy, and clout to play these games. It doesn't really matter how you…

An argument, if anything, for open, transparent, and responsible governance. Certainly something that we are particularly struggling with at the moment.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#168

Post by icebraining »

hjnilsson wrote: post #10
TorKlingberg wrote: post #8

So, who ultimately appoints the directors? It sounds like it is Kamprad's heirs, but through some layers of indirection that prevents them from meddling directly.

There have been many inquires into this by Swedish journalists over the years, but it's a very dense structure of companies with unclear ownership and structure. So who controls it is unknown. It is also a great tax evasion schema since the ownership is a charity (that donates money to "product design"), allowing IKEA to escape vast sums of taxation globally.

that donates money to "product design"

They also fund programs by Save the Children: http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.827580...

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#169

Post by sooheon »

charlesdm wrote: post #159
sooheon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The politicians will never bite the hand that feeds. The mega rich both write the laws and benefit from them, this does not excuse the behavior morally, only makes it legal on paper (which, apparently is enough for some of you).

But who is at fault here then? You can blame the wealthy all you want, but it would not be possible without the cooperation of politicians that are elected by the people.

> elected by the people

Elections lie on a spectrum from fair to sham, and the greater the influence of the powerful, the more it resembles a sham.

Re: Ikea founder leaves fortune to no one, structures it to ensure it lasts forever

#170

Post by dsacco »

_jal wrote: post #141
dsacco wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You find the introduction of definitional precision to be an annoying, cheap trick? What exactly are you achieving if you don’t rigorously define your terms and agree upon them? You make it sound like insisting on that is just a method of sophistry, but it’s the foundation of human communication. We cannot possibly talk about anything in a productive way if we’re not being precise in our terminology. Nuance and conte…

I see a ton of imprecision in technical discussions here daily, and that's a topic on which one would expect some expertise here. And yet the pedantry that receives is far less annoying than the inevitable tax avoidance cliche-rants. Why? Because there the pedantry is at least topical. Here, it is arguing language in order to grind an axe on a side issue almost completely unrelated to the Ikea founder.

Natural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions. In the latter you argue against the meaning of a word instead of the intended meaning of the argument.

In point of fact, it’s pedantic to dismiss an argument from legality on the grounds that it’s “legal” and not “ethical”, because legalislation (and more importantly the reasoning behind it) is a subset of ethics. A carefully considered discussion will include the existing literature that has come out of previously considered discussion; therefore it is fully reasonable to consider legal arguments in a discussion of ethics.

To reiterate, you need not agree with legal arguments, but to call them pedantic or irrelevant is simply incorrect. They’re exceptionally topical.

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