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Comment by rrggrr | Hacker News Reader

Obama recently bemoaned the 8 trillion or so in wealth that is not circulating with much, if any, frequency in the US economy. As he and others have observed, it's sequestered overseas and at home, waiting for a time when confidence is higher and taxes lower. Unless a mechanism exists to prevent smart money from finding safe havens from taxes, instability and currency flux (Even China is currently failing at this task) redistribution and populist ideals are always due to fail. This is the message the "trickle down" and free market cheerleaders try to communicate, poorly.

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I suppose a case could be made that people are entitled to a share of the success that they didn't help provide, but no one ever even tries to make it. It's just assumed to be true. Care to make the case?

If you lean on the nebulous idea that being born into a society is somehow a contribution to any particular success in general, I'm going to assume you're bullshitting. Fair warning.

It's less a matter of what you are entitled to, and more that society doesn't work very well with gross disparity. I always argue it's in the interests of the wealthy to mind that everyone else is happy with the way things are. Otherwise you get violent populist uprisings. Stability & happiness of the whole country are in the interest of those on top of it.

enter the NFL, MLB, NBA & Netflix + cheap flat screen televisions.

yep. and if we'd just clear up healthcare then the masses would be set and placated.

Keeping the population in line by fattening them up and distracting them only works if they believe in something bigger than themselves.

With the lack of community and the focus on individual and the self, people will not be fulfilled if they know someone else is doing so much better.

It's the classic monkey experiment with cucumbers. If all monkeys get cucumbers, they are all okay with it. If one monkey gets a cherry while the other gets a cucumber, the cucumber monkey feels it's unfair and gets angry.

You can keep humans in shitty conditions if they believe in something bigger than themselves. That the shitty conditions are justified and therefore fair.

> I suppose a case could be made that people are entitled to a share of the success that they didn't help provide, but no one ever even tries to make it.

Ha! If you genuinely want to hear people (very passionately) make this argument, try proposing a higher estate tax

TBH most of it is not about finding havens but about avoiding taxes.

The rich and corporations hiding their money is precisely the problem with "trickle down" and an unregulated free market. The solution is not to give in and pay the extortion money (ie. cut taxes), but to reign them in.

Or, you know, we could just seize the assets because of tax evasion. But that will never happen because our politicians are in the pocket of the robber barons.

I think most of them are actually robber barons themself. At least the ones with real influence.

Most (if not all) of these cases are not dealing with tax evasion. It's actually legal tax avoidance, so there's no way to seize the assets because no-one has actually broken the law.

Many countries have very low (or zero) tax rates, so you can legally set up a company and put your money there.

I think one way to get rid of tax havens is with an international treaty to set some minimum tax rates, and have an embargo against any country that doesn't meet those requirements. It's not just the rich who are to blame, it's the countries that turn themselves into tax havens and make this all possible.

The laws say whatever politicians want them to say. If you pay the people who write the laws to turn your tax evasion into a legalized form of "tax avoidance," the inverse can just as easily be done to turn "tax avoidance" back into "tax evasion."

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