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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

#281
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A someone who is broadly sympathetic to the idea of labor ownership of the means of production, could I trouble you to explain what's so obvious about the stupidity of this plan? Taxes on corporate profits are generally seen as reasonable in the abstract, and they're common all over the world. I could see setting an unusually high tax rate being problematic, but that doesn't appear to be what happened. And it doesn't…

The problem with socialists policies like this is not necessarily the high taxes or the hostile takeover aspect of it. The issue is the intent. When socialists start doing stuff like this, it is clear what the long term goal is. The long term goal is to take the means of production from those who have it, though whatever politically palpable means necessary. Sure, they start off doing a voluntary stock buyout program…

Looks to me like the Swedish people did, in fact, come to the conclusion their socialist policy didn't work and reversed it via the normal political process. According to the wiki, the Social Democrats retook power three years later and didn't attempt to reintroduce it.

That looks to me like pretty compelling historical evidence against the hypothesis that socialist experiments must necessarily slide down the slippery slope to full-on communism.

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

#282
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was obviously a well crafted image, but hardly one invented out of whole cloth. For example non of the three homes he owned[0] would classify as luxury by any reasonable rich person standard. His 'luxury' house in Switzerland was probably not even among 10 most expensive houses in town and was significantly smaller than most billionaires garages. His house in Sweden is in the middle of nowhere, the sort of place w…

Looks like an average upper middle class house in the US. Hardly swanky.

I’m Geneva that costs a few million dollars. Not much by billionaire standards but not cheap either.

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

#283
post #32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever had a haircut in sweden you know why...

Yup, a cheap haircut is about €20, I pay around €70 for mine in a mid-high-end salon but have seen places up to €120. I'm a man.

get mine cut in Medellin for $2.50 or about 10,000 pesos

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

#284
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the laws are the rules, the rules are publicly published, and everyone has access to them. If McDonald's is selling a 10 piece McNuggets for $1.49, and a 20 piece for $4.99, then buying 2 x 10 piece McNuggets for $2.98 is a loophole around paying $4.99. If you find it immoral, so be it, but it doesn't change that you're paying more for McNuggets than McDonald's requires you to pay.

and everyone has access to them The ordinary taxpayer isn’t in a position to exploit interactions between n jurisdictions tax codes, are they?

Most people don't buy IBC totes of dish soap to save a few bucks on the unit price because it's impractical, never-mind that they don't have the equipment to reasonably deal with liquids in that volume.

If you're not that rich then it doesn't make sense to go all out optimizing your taxes because the savings aren't big enough and the costs of doing so are high enough to make the net result a savings.

Not being rich enough to have access to certain tax avoiding structures is like complaining you not being able to get the savings of buying a ton of dish soap because you don't have a fork lift.

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

#285

The development of no small part of English common law was the result of a multi-century cat and mouse game between wealthy landowners that wanted to keep their property in the family "forever" and everyone else that didn't want to have the dead hand of the past control substantial portions of the country's productive assets. Two groups in particular that didn't like to see assets locked away were dissolute heirs and…

Related, I remember reading that Jefferson worked hard to prevent inheritance in fee tail from becoming established in our republic.

Related? http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/bill-for...

In the current political climate I wonder if fee tail could be brought back. The predominate opinion among economists and, especially, legal scholars on the far right seems to be in favor of removing any and all limitations on the enforceability of contracts and trusts, and I could see the far right in many states embrace a return of fee tail as it would be easy sell to their political base as a way to preserve property in the family.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a friend accountant/layer said: there will always be people coming to us, spending 51k to avoid paying 50k of taxes, and we'll help them arrange that. Legal isn't the same as moral, so sometimes the legal limit becomes meaningless.

51k going to an accountant in your community is probably a more moral way to spend your money than 50k going to fund a war. If one is going to judge a client's morality by his eagerness to spend more money than his tax bill in order to avoid paying that bill, that same moral lens needs to be applied to the accountant knowingly charging his client more than the client would save in taxes.

This. I'd pay $120 to a lawyer to get a $100 traffic ticket dropped.

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

#287

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.

I propose a new word to solve this problem: avoision. This word describes a practice that is in all essences tax evasion but may not be technically found by courts to be illegal, or may be an untested grey area legally.

I think it's a nice, cromulent word that we can all agree on.

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

#288
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version that was introduced in 1982 was a water downed version of the original plan, the Social democrats lost an election because of the original plan in 1976 against the popular opposition leader and farmer Thorbjörn Fälldin. Fälldin broke a 40 year long social democratic rule. Fälldin described the plan as DDR style economics with the subsequent removing of personal freedoms. Original plan was to create funds to w…

> After controlling the major companies in Sweden, they would have of course continued with the non-public companies, because the main goal of Löntagarfonder was to create equal salaries between high profit companies and low profit companies. No, that was the "solidarity in wages" policy which was already implemented. It was this policy that made successful companies make excess profits. Those profits were supposed t…

Your are absolutely right, goal of löntagarfonder was increased worker control and workers do work at non-public companies as well.

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

#289

> The foundation owns itself, so no Kamprad family members hold shares. Late stage capitalism... Anyway, I don't really get why the article claims he didn't care about money. It's known for a while that IKEA avoids taxes in many dodgy ways. If he really didn't care, the connected companies could pay a reasonable amount.

Not everybody feels the same that you do about government. Hell, I feel differently about different layers of government. I would probably not seeking to minimize my city or state taxes any more than is convenient, but I'll never give the federal government any more than it takes to keep my head.

I'd be willing to pay more city and state taxes if I could pay them to cities or states of my choosing.

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

#290
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, I remember reading that Jefferson worked hard to prevent inheritance in fee tail from becoming established in our republic.

Related? http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/bill-for... In the current political climate I wonder if fee tail could be brought back. The predominate opinion among economists and, especially, legal scholars on the far right seems to be in favor of removing any and all limitations on the enforceability of contracts and trusts, and I could see the far right in many states embrace a return of fee tail as…

> In the current political climate I wonder if fee tail could be brought back

Unwinding capitalism as overly progressive and retreating to feudalism seems entirely in line with the politics of the present US ruling faction, and bringing back fee tail would be a natural step toward that.

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