Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

It's very simple: do you think murder is wrong? Yes or no?

If your answer is yes, then we can talk about the definition of murder as opposed to war, justified homicide, etc.

If your answer is no, then we can talk about objective morality, and why it wouldn't be ok for me to kill you just because I feel like it--i.e. why there is objective morality, because if there isn't, then there is no moral reason for me not to kill you and take all your stuff whenever I feel like it.

> I'm sorry if I took your response of "many people think this" as a serious response. ... And if you can't answer my questions about murder, which apparently is such an easy moral issue for you.

You literally asked, "Who says murder is wrong?" I literally answered the question. Your question was obviously rhetorical, yet pointless, because you didn't make a point by asking it. So I then asked the relevant, next, serious question, to move the discussion forward. You then declined to answer it, instead making silly personal attacks, as if performing for an audience. Note, BTW, that I haven't said anything about taxation.

It seems to be you who is not interested in seriously discussing objective morality, yet it is you who raised the topic, and you obviously know that most people disagree. Therefore you seem to be trolling. A shame, because it could be an interesting conversation.

Please prove me wrong by taking the conversation seriously now.

The issue is that VAT, in practice, ends up being a game where the purchaser hands money to the company, they hand part of it to the taxman, then immediately get most of it back anyway (by maximizing their tax claim). That's why it's assigned to the purchaser: in the end, it's the only subject that is actually out of pocket for the full amount, the company having reclaimed most of it back from the taxman. This is why governments love VAT: because it's a tax on people, not on companies. I understand why somebody arguing for flat or nonexistent taxes might like it, but it certainly is not part of the solution from the perspective of making businesses pay their fair share - the opposite, in fact. In that sense, it's pointless to use it to model anything beyond price pressure on consumers; and that is not what the problem is about.

> Or that the company made the goods entirely from scratch.

That's one of the problems of economic theory (or rather Econ 101, as we discussed earlier): everything is so simplified that it ends up bearing to resemblance with reality. Nobody makes anything from scratch anymore, and the mess that is IP law (or other rules around "services") makes it so that a company can basically decide how much of this or that tax they actually want to pay by moving entities around the world and making up enough input vat to offset most of their output vat. And of course, they want to pay barely enough to avoid jail, so in the end, the high-tax societies from which they extract most profit are actually the ones that end up out of pocket.

> The weeds will take over if you let them.

Weeds is a good parallel except it isn't, since I cannot extract money for the gardener from weeds - whereas I absolutely can extract money from companies to shore up the impact they have on the societies they benefit from. That's the problem.

Please point to a reference to the isle of jersey in Apple's public financials document. I want to know about evading corporate tax by rerouting profits to tax havens.

1) Most non multinational corporations produce both corporate and income tax revenues. Why shouldn't Apple? 2) Ditto 3) This is like apple writing "IOU" on a piece of paper. That money could be getting used to fund schools, to rebuild infrastructure and it has a time value. All of which Apple is capturing.

You seem to think that money which should be getting taxed by the corporate tax rate somehow "belongs" to the shareholders in some ethical (not legal) sense, and I think this is the root of our disagreement. Ethically, Apple is an American corporation and it was American taxpayers who allowed the company to flourish. Perhaps also some European countries played a role here. Therefore if they want to impose a corporate tax they should be able to, separate from the income and dividends tax.