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I am a fan of the UK system. Historically significant assets are free of taxes (inheritance, capital gains) provided they are available for public viewing.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/gds/heritage/colsearch.htm

That is kinda brilliant - more so that you can search from there and see what items you as the public can view and when. Heck could plan some nice days out around this - brilliant.

Can Americans transfer assets to the UK without realizing gains in order to take advantage of this?

Also - I guess this is why most of the aristocracy that live in castles open their property up to the public for a few days every year.

Security by obscurity.

This summer a truck full of ammo was robbed here in Sweden and I was equally shocked that a truck full of ammunition was allowed travel through customs and then just let go into the country without any tracking.

The driver (probably insider) was sleeping on the side of the road when someone just took all the ammo from the back.

What are the normal precautions there for dealing with ammo? Here you have to be 18 to buy it but it is just on the shelves at many stores that sell hunting and fishing supplies.

I'm not sure about ammo but weapons are of course heavily regulated. So much so that as a registered weapon owner you must tell the Police of the route you take from home to the gun range. At least this is what I heard many years ago. I have no interest in this topic besides being firmly against all forms of weapons in the hands of civilians.

And you're not allowed to store the weapon assembled, and you must use a certified gun cabinet. These are also things I've picked up along the way, without actually looking into them.

IMO there is only one case for having guns in the hands of civilians other than hunting - self defense against wild animals when hiking. I mean, Sweden has bears, moose and wild pigs, how are people supposed to defend against these?

This is an imaginary problem.

"31 people were attacked in all of Scandinavia between 1977 and 2012. Few of the attacks had deadly outcomes and almost all took place during a hunt."

https://sweden.se/nature/swedens-most-dangerous-animal/

Turns out if you leave them alone they leave you alone. You don't need to 'defend' yourself against them, let alone with firearms.

Thanks for the insight!

My brother spends a significant amount of time outdoors (not hunting) and was attacked and seriously injured by a wild animal, with two more attacks by the same species in the same area in the same year, one of which resulted in another hiker's death. A year later my brother was charged by a moose in a different area.

Animal attacks are real, and even when you leave them alone they won't always leave you alone. That said, bear spray is much more effective than a firearm, and has saved my brother's life in the past.

That's one data point.

Let's look at the data in aggregate instead, in order to make a decision, using the link I already gave. It's an extraordinarily low risk. I'm not even sure how quickly a hiker could bring a rifle into battery when they're just hiking along. And a pistol isn't going to stop a large animal. Whole thing seems unrealistic to me.

Bear spray, easily reachable on one's person, will be much more effective than a pistol. But data-wise, you have to consider that most near-misses probably aren't reported, that successfully defended attacks may not even be reported, and that people in certain environments will have a much greater risk than the average.

People foraging berries in Swedden place themselves in the same places as bears sometimes. I had seen a video showing a real "bear attack" and is very interesting. They have lots of close encounters each year.

A female bear is startled and charges towards the people, the researcher keep his ground and the bear makes an arc to avoid crossing paths.

Moose is the biggest killer in the area with difference. They are really dangerous when involved in car crashes because they have very tall legs, so in an accident the animal is pushed trough the windshield inside the car. Then, the struggling moose trying to break free, typically will hit repeatedly the driver in the head and torso with his legs

> A female bear is startled and charges towards the people

Which is why the #1 preventative step taught in Canada (where we also have large bears and moose) is to be noisy. If the Bear, Moose, Deer, etc can hear you from a decent distance, they'll get well out of your way before you even know they're there.

I've been camping since before I can remember (literally) and the only "protection" we bring is mace and bear bangers (basically tiny fireworks without the lightshow). We've come across bears a number of times, but never had to use either. Just talk loudly and make some noise, and they just wander away.

I think the reason so many attacks happen to hunters is because they're trying to be stealthy and end up sneaking up on them (whether on purpose or or not), which is when they are dangerous.

Relying on a firearm to stop a brown or a moose at close range before it ends you is an iffy gamble. Firearms are more for protecting you from the most dangerous animal in the woods.

The firearms are for sale at the same locations but behind a counter locked with a cable lock or in a glass case. 18 for a long gun 21 for a handgun. Background check over phone takes about 10 minutes.

How do you deliver a truckload of ammo to a shady buyer? Simple. Take the money. Setup an ammo transfer from warehouse A to warehouse B. Tip they buyer where the driver would be making a stop.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...

"The art market is going nuts. People are spending record amounts of money of paintings like Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. But not everyone is rushing home to hang their new artwork up on their walls. A lot of buyers are storing their art in vast warehouses near airports. They're called, "freeports."

Freeports exist between countries, a sort of no man's land, which means you can store your artwork there as long as you want, without having to pay any taxes on it."

Haha, so then, if your art is stolen from a freeport, you don't ever pay the taxes.

This makes the hilarious incentive for people to steal their own purchased artwork from themselves, so they can finally display it (while dodging the tax). Or else just claim its still in storage while absconding the work to the manor, etc.

I would imagine the security protocols of freeports like Geneva or Singapore make it pretty hard to fake any theft; and artworks valuable enough to be stored in places like that are usually insured, so you'd have the insurance investigator to deal with.

Claiming it's in storage while it's actually not: that might work, especially if it's something small and you can smuggle in a copy.

Whether "Salvator Mundi" is hiding in a freeport, or hiding on one of MBS's many many walls, either way it still wasn't painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

(There is some controversy about this, but the side I take is taken by more than the press lets on, because the auction houses have taken the other side and pissing them off can be career-ending.)

https://news.artnet.com/opinion/kenny-schachter-on-the-missi...

Your comment reminded me that there is a lot of art and artifacts simply kept in warehouses, and treated mostly as investment assets: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/arts/design/one-of-the-wo...

As far as I understand it, this even includes da Vinci's Salvator Mundi... how sad is that?

I don't know about the tax laws elsewhere, but IIRC, in the US gains from art are taxed as income, not as capital gains, which would seem to reduce their attractiveness as investment vehicles dramatically.

There are ways around this. Art collectors have started building museums on their properties with limited, often onerous public access:

"Wealthy collectors, of course, have long saved millions of dollars in federal taxes by donating art and money to museums and foundations. But what distinguishes Mr. Brant’s center and a growing number of private tax-exempt exhibition spaces like it is that their founders can deduct the full market value of any art, cash and stocks they donate, even when the museums are just a quick stroll from their living rooms."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/business/art-collectors-g...

Buildings are often protected as cultural heritage, even though they are private, the owner can't change them at whim, and preserving the looks is usually not enough. Isn't the situation similar with books or art?

You bring up an interesting point (and perspective) on this. I have to admit, I honestly don't know if/how things might be regulated (if at all) for works of literary art (with historical/cultural significance).

AFAIK, with buildings these regulations (now) exists because they didn't in the past. People got really upset with other people just demolishing what they held dear, public outcry as a result and eventually regulations too. But in this situation the destruction is often driven by space being a scarce commodity (especially in cities).

I doubt that books often get destroyed to make way for new ones (barring a few criminal/extremist authoritarian regimes), so it might never have reached a point where enough people got upset about it and demand regulation.

But now I am curious though, if there are indeed regulations for these kind of works. If there are, that would essentially render my original opinion null and void.

Still, I would prefer it that way, rather than know that these works will end up in the hands of the financially powerful private hands. For I have little faith in that lot and their antics.

> But now I am curious though, if there are indeed regulations for these kind of works.

Plenty of countries have some level of regulation on this sort of thing.

After all, there's a long history of national cultural treasures being looted. Everything from the British Museum acquiring the Elgin Marbles under very sketchy circumstances to Hobby Lobby having a bunch of Egyptian and Iraqi artefacts seized.

Of course, it's debatable where such protections need to start. Only a defined list of items? Only items 200+ years old and worth $250,000+? More?

Some countries have cultural heritage protection laws that prevent exports of certain protected pieces of art. So it's kinda similar.

Books are a classic thing that should just be digitized and the originals sold off.

The value is in the content, not the paper and ink. In todays digital world, we can make thousands of copies and distribute them all over the world, giving the content a far far better chance of long term survival than the paper and ink would have had even in the best library. Even libraries burn down. Even the most stable countries have a civil war occasionally...

"Books are a classic thing that should just be digitized and the originals sold off. The value is in the content, not the paper and ink."

Physical books do actually matter to a lot of people, especially if these books have a history.

In fact, books are really no different than any other physical item in this respect, and their ability to be digitized does not decrease their value as physical objects in the slightest.

There was an interesting Radiolab episode called "Things"[1] about exactly this. I'd recommend listening to if if you're interested in what makes things with a history valuable.

[1] - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/thing...

> The value is in the content, not the paper and ink.

That's not entirely true. While it might be considered a bit of am extreme example, think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropodermic_bibliopegy

The paper and ink can tell/show us things about the technical environment in which these books were created. If you sell them off to a collector, scientists lose access to them.

So long as the collector is known science doesn't lose access. Access becomes harder for sure, but most collectors will let some people view their collection. Many collectables have clubs where club members are invited to each others houses to see their collection. Even where the collector is a very private person, the right person asking can generally get access (so long as they swear to secrecy).

Also sometimes the book bindings themselves contain hidden texts, as they recycled old scraps for the materials[1]. This stuff is fascinating and there's a bunch of great related content on this blog.

[1] https://medievalbooks.nl/2015/12/18/x-rays-expose-a-hidden-m...

Well, antique books/prints were sometimes using recycled materials like even older books. The old writings can only be uncovered using x-ray scans or other tech. If you just do a normal scan, you lose the hidden layers.

Also, to track the origins and the history of a physical book you can do material analyses (carbon dating etc.) that are impossible if you just have the digital version.

> The value is in the content, not the paper and ink.

No, some subset of the reading public will love the physical artifact and feel that it complements the content. I love my Kindle and phone and have read hundreds of books on them, but I find digital devices a poor way to read poetry: ebook formats lack support for the complex typesetting of much poetry, and even if it is scanned as a PDF the result is cumbersome.

This is true of even some novels. I found it very difficult to get into Proust on my Kindle, and only once I bought a set of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade volumes did I start to enjoy reading it.

Of course, with regard to antique books from past centuries, an even smaller demographic will want to collect and read those and refuse digital editions or more recent printings, but those people still exist.

> Books are a classic thing that should just be digitized and the originals sold off.

I'd generally agree though thinking it thru - there have been instances in which researchers have found hidden ink/pages hidden under pictures and other such discoveries that would not be possible with a simple digital scan. Xray's and other spectral light scans on-top of the visual spectrum RGB scans may be a solution but that is not at a level for today's scanning of such works and costly already without that step.

So mixed feelings and in general, yes they should be scanned - but as a reason to offload the original - that has some grey area's that would need addressing.

There are two different types of value, simultaneously existing. The content is valuable, certainly. But the actual physical artifact is also valuable, for different reasons.

I liken it to prototype/prerelease software - the data is certainly valuable, but at the same time a physical artifact with actual provenance can be worth a pretty penny too. It also irks me when people say "oh, it devalues the physical artifact if you preserve the data". No, because the physical artifact itself cannot be duplicated.

> Books are a classic thing that should just be digitized and the originals sold off.

> The value is in the content, not the paper and ink.

Why wouldn't this logic apply to e.g. paintings as well? Or even sculpture and various historical artifacts...

Edit:

I was asking the question rhetorically, to highlight the weakness of the original observation. Personally I do think there can be intrinsic historical value in the object of a book, regardless of the information that it happens to store.

You are wrong in that they are also physical historical artifacts. The physical items are valuable to historical studies. Particularly unique or handmade books.

I agree with everything in your comment, but I wanted to point something out that I found out recently: apparently Las Vegas is full of independent used/rare/second-hand bookstores.

Pieces like these shouldn't be allowed to disappear from public eyes and ownership, but at least they probably won't be auctioned off next to a craps table.

The first thing that came into my mind too. Great importance to international cultural heritage, but hey, they are auctioned off to a private person instead of ending in a museum/whatever is best qualified to take care of it.

The state arbitrarily deciding that privately-owned material objects are of “societal value” and then confiscating them has a bad history in Romania, and ex-Communist countries in general.

On the other hand, the state deciding that books being forcibly copied (without the owner’s permission) and all copies collected together, turned out to be a great idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Private individuals deciding that objects X, Y, and Z are valuable, then buying them at auctions, and sealing them away from the public, to then have them be lost in time and space, is not exactly better.

Digitize as far as possible, otherwise replicate if possible. Then distribute all over the place. Make it accessible, and make it ubiquitous. Any single point of collection will eventually fail. Private collectors are (even) less likely to do this correctly than public actors.

Yes, it’s much better. I’d rather that some artistic objects be lost to time than to give the state authority to take anything it desires. That’s a direct attack on the concept of private property.

Otherwise, yes I agree with the desire to digitize and preserve as much as possible.

> I agree with the desire to digitize and preserve as much as possible.

But if you put private property above all else, then you need to explain who would have an incentive to take on the digitization/curation/archival/distribution work, and why.

Artifacts only command a premium because they are unique. Private organizations, at least profit driven ones, have very little if any incentive to digitize and make something available in the highest quality possible, if they just spent a sizeable amount of money to have exclusive access to it. And that's not even saying something about making it available as a real commons.

On the other hand, non-profit organizations are either largely publicly funded, at which the distinction to "the state" becomes blurry, or privately funded, in which case we again depend on the goodwill of a few rich individuals and on their choices what is and isn't worth preserving, and what is and isn't going to be available to the public. Yay! /s

Yes, the ancient Alexandrian method of "confiscate and make a copy" then return the original to the owner. That seems the most just method all the way around.

In turn, ex-Communist countries have a bad history of arbitrarily disregarding objects of societal value.

If it's books they were likely confiscating them to burn them :)

Welcome to capitalism.