Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#91

Post by goatinaboat » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

sprafa wrote: post #88

goatinaboat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power. The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.

The EU didn’t do that, states did that. And if I’m not mistaken part of the reason why it went away was the EU kept giving them advice to stop it.

The EU requires member countries to let money cross their borders, and grants corporations the right to pay taxes for the entire EU in the member country of their choosing.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#92

Post by Maarten88 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #81

jussij wrote: post #34

It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national. Just take Apple as one example. Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax. This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now. From what I recall Google s…

What you call a scam, I call healthy competition between nation-states, with the fringe benefit of keeping everyone honest. The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.

> healthy competition between nation-states

Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.

Personally I believe that healthy is when there is a power balance between democratically controlled government and privately owned business. They should be about equal in power. In many western countries, especially the US, the power balance has shifted completely toward business. Business can dictate law and make governments compete with one another for their money.

This is obviously the wrong way around, it undermines democracy (aka the people) and benefits business owners (aka the rich). Business should compete with another, governments should set rules for their markets. If a country votes for high taxes and generous public services, this should be priced in by business, not undermined and circumvented.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#93

Post by ur-whale » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

Maarten88 wrote: post #92

ur-whale wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call a scam, I call healthy competition between nation-states, with the fringe benefit of keeping everyone honest. The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.

> healthy competition between nation-states Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom. Personally I believe that healthy is when there is a power balance between democratically controlled government and privately owned business. They should be about equal in power. In many western countries, especially the US,…

>Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.

I'm not hearing anything remotely bad in this sentence.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#94

Post by anovikov » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #63

anovikov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the inifinite scalability of success in the digital world, right? How can we complain if we are all actively working on the same thing?

Right. And our economic model needs to change to account for that scalability, because the natural constraint which previously made the system work(ish) has gone.

I would say we must adjust our political model rather than economical. Let go of 'everyone votes' democracy, to give more representation to these people in the top 1% and less to the bottom 50% who don't contribute, just take from the public. Otherwise the government will turn into charade, it already does, see Trump. How can we expect people who don't pay takes, to vote responsibly? They don't put their money on the table.

Do it, or Chinese will do it for us.