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

Post by bsbechtel » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 9:29 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #292

bsbechtel wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OTOH, the fervor with which some people avoid taxes evidences a lack of civic responsibility. If people don't feel invested in their government to the point of spitefully taking a loss just to avoid paying a tax it makes it easier for ethically bankrupt people to assume the reigns of power. That kind of leadership is how we get into wars in the first place.

Post by garmaine » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #266

garmaine wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's missing the point...

That's because the point seems ideological, without any backing in reason. Why is a government buying a majority of a company's shares on the public markets bad? Why is one man, or an investment firm buying a majority of shares of a company any better? An attack on this is an attack on the concept of public markets. 'Public markets' does a lot of work in this claim. There's an obvious difference between shotgun natio…

Post by seanmcdirmid » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #189

kolla wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He owned several luxury houses and most certanly never bought 2nd hand clothes even if he wore simple clothes. So it was a carefully crafted image, not what he actually did.

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…

Post by JoeAltmaier » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #264

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee-owned is very different from employee-managed. I recall VW put a single member of labor on their board; it broke the company as other members courted the vote of the uninformed labor rep, giving up perks until labor costs were bankrupting the place. Companies operating in a competitive environment have to be pretty efficient. Optimizing a company for employee benefits is pretty much at odds with that. I know…

An anecdotal characterization of the members of a board catering to a single representative of labor on that board isn't a model for what employee managed companies look like. Of course, since labor representation on boards is widespread in Germany, most medium to large German businesses are a good example. I assume the German economy is in tatters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Post by ThrustVectoring » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

vec wrote: post #210

akuji1993 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds so obviously stupid I wonder why nobody stopped and said "You know, we might just make all these companies leave with stuff as ridiculous as this."

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…