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Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

businessinsider.com

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Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#21

Post by GordonS »

kfk wrote: post #16
GordonS wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For cancer yes, but for a back pain Yes. Someone shouldn't have to suffer in pain because they work a low paid job, or are unemployed. > The only way to make healthcare universal is to work out serious insurance plans It's not the only way. The other way is for our taxes to foot the bill, as we do in the UK with the NHS. The NHS is far from perfect, with long waiting lists and varying levels of care depending on yo…

Well, I have never seen a healthcare system that works well for non-deadly issues like back pain and I have lived in Italy, Denmark and Germany. Also, at the end of the day somebody has to pay the bill, so either you pay with taxes or someone else has to pay yours with his taxes. Considering population is getting older, people that can pay your healthcare bills are going to be scarcer and scarcer. From a practical st…

> Well, I have never seen a healthcare system that works well for non-deadly issues like back pain

As above, see the UK for a good example. TBH, I don't really know how healthcare works anywhere but the UK and US, but I had sort of assumed that other EU countries had a similar universal system to that of the UK.

> people that can pay your healthcare bills are going to be scarcer and scarcer

Your point has some validity, but tax revenues do not just come from personal income tax. Corporation tax, VAT, petroleum tax, council tax, insurance tax, air tax, road tax... christ, there is hardly anything that isn't taxed!

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#22

Post by mattmanser »

reustle wrote: post #7
mattmanser wrote: post #6

Seems like it'll be a non-starter for most sane businesses given the insane reporting requirements. we started to ask companies to give us more data. The reason is we wanted to get rid of fraud. Currently, all the companies in Estonia are declaring their B2B deals. If I’m a company and you’re a company and I buy something off you and it’s more than €1,000, we both have to declare it

How is this insane? It's just about keeping very clear logs of the transactions, right? I's not like in the US they don't know where my money transfers are coming from.

What business is it of a government what I spend money on?

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#23

Post by wmf »

natchiketa wrote: post #19

From https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/ e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union. The e-Resident smart ID card is not a physical identification or a travel document, and does not display a photo.

It's like they chose the second most misleading name they could think of (#1 being "e-citizen").

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#24

Post by wmf »

mattmanser wrote: post #6

Seems like it'll be a non-starter for most sane businesses given the insane reporting requirements. we started to ask companies to give us more data. The reason is we wanted to get rid of fraud. Currently, all the companies in Estonia are declaring their B2B deals. If I’m a company and you’re a company and I buy something off you and it’s more than €1,000, we both have to declare it

But if they call it Estoniachain companies will be tripping over each other to get on the bandwagon.

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#25

Post by wodenokoto »

mattmanser wrote: post #22
reustle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this insane? It's just about keeping very clear logs of the transactions, right? I's not like in the US they don't know where my money transfers are coming from.

What business is it of a government what I spend money on?

It's their tax business.

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#26

Post by SyneRyder »

Estonia's E-Residency program has gotten a few mentions on HN before, at one point they actually replied to some of the comments here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537551

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10407604

And Kaspar Korjus, director of the E-Residency program, gave an AMA over on the Digital Nomad forum a few months ago:

https://nomadforum.io/t/i-m-kaspar-director-of-estonia-s-e-r...

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#27

Post by legitster »

Estonia is such an interesting country. Story is that after the fall of communism they built, their entire economic model off of Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" book, having relatively little knowledge of any economics. This lead to some very interesting successes as a post-communist nation, especially considering Free to Choose was likely a banned book just a few years before. It sounds like they are going even further to the right and experimenting with some of the ideas from Anarcho-capitalism.

Bully for them. It's been working for them in the past, and it's nice to see a government that (at least seems) to have their act together trying out some weird and out there stuff.

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#28

Post by gamblor956 »

Bartweiss wrote: post #4

Given the long history of flags of convenience and purchasable citizenship in tax havens, something like this seems bound to be attempted eventually. If it takes off, it'll be curious to see how hard the pushback is.

Their doesn't need to be pushback. Every country that has an income tax taxes its residents, whether or not they are citizens.

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#29

Post by tyingq »

wodenokoto wrote: post #25
mattmanser wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What business is it of a government what I spend money on?

It's their tax business.

It's unusual for a government to ask for recordings of individual transactions. Tax forms tend to ask for aggregate numbers on quarterly or yearly boundaries.

Re: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'

#30

Post by sf_rob »

Bartweiss wrote: post #18
tzaman wrote: post #8

Imagine this becoming a thing. Where anyone could eventually become Estonia's resident with all the rights (and of course responsibilities) equal to the people actually living there. Once other nations would follow, then the borders would truly start to disappear because it wouldn't really matter where you are located. No more us and them, just people of the earth. I know it's way too optimistic and this solution pro…

The cynical read on the same statement is "therefore other countries will stop respecting Estonian citizenship to maintain selectivity". Shipping's been done under flags of convenience for years, but I suspect a lot of people will be deeply unwilling to walk that road for residence.

>"therefore other countries will stop respecting Estonian citizenship to maintain selectivity".

This has already happened in St Kitts[1][2]. They sold citezenship with very few non-financial requirements and now other nations have started screening travellers from there more aggressively, requiring visas, etc.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Kitts_and_Nevis_passport [2]http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/02/468953007/episo...

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