Opinion: Don’t Stop at Big Tech–We Need to Bust Big Agriculture, Too
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
It's nothing conceptually different from the US deciding to tax its citizens on their worldwide income even when they are living abroad. It's "completely independent of where they're actually doing business or living"
The Double Irish involves a company in non-Ireland country A doing business with a customer in non-Ireland country B, and routing that transaction through Ireland. I have no issue with either A or B deciding that they ought to tax this transaction, because both countries are relevant.
If large corporations can decide to pick their country of incorporation freely and according to what most benefits them, but people can't (in general) pick their country of citizenship, then something has gone wrong.
After all, there ARE countries where more or less anyone can relatively easily become a citizen, it's just that most people don't want to actually live in those countries.
Some countries give people easy visas on arrival. Others make you jump through several hoops. Why? Perhaps this works out best for both groups of countries. The first group benefits from the tourism dollars, the second group perhaps sees benefits from not having the country flooded by tourists who might or might not leave easily.
I'm not sure where this fits into your argument anyway, but I could not identify what country you might mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization#Summary_by_coun...
A (low) bar to residency which leads to being eligible to apply for citizenship after a several years' commitment (also being highly dependent on any political change during those years) is not what I would call an "easy" process.
It's been true for decades that multinational corporations can push governments around by threatening to move their HQ or manufacturing or literally any other public benefit that they provide (like jobs) to any of the other countries they operate in (and maybe even some new ones that are campaigning for their attention).
Of course it's more complex than that in practice, but in a similar way that billionaires are (or can be seen as) a systemic economic failure, so too can highly capitalized organizations manipulate their living environments for their sole benefit, to the detriment of the vast majority of people that the organization touches with their actions. Jamie Dimon and Steve Mnuchin should be in prison right now for their performances around 2008, but instead they are vaunted leaders worldwide suffering zero consequences for their widely-destructive failures. This state of affairs is obviously not a meritocracy.
Antitrust enforcement operates pretty much at the leisure of the offenders, regulatorily captured like a lot of oversight in our increasingly authoritarian world.
I don't think the size of the company really matters, just how hungry politicians are for votes, and how starved their government is for tax money.
The second issue is that federalisation of taxation and spending creates a race to the bottom between state entities. The problem isn't only that some city doesn't want to throw money away on a stadium - it's that they're put in a position where another city will buy the team a new stadium. In reality this is state intervention to prop up a private business like a state buying warehouses for Amazon. It destroys the prospect of ever taxing corporations - or indeed more than that, it uses state spending to subsidize private corporations.
I don’t like the system we have now but I also don’t like corporate governance being determined by market size.
Snowcrash...
Autonomous zones appear to be leaving the realm of science fiction and into reality.
But this is too close. Instead, let's remember how the Hanseatic Union, an multi-national sea trade corporation of medieval times, waged war on Danish and Norwegian kings which had the impudence to plunder one of its trade ports, and won singlehandedly.
Shouldn't this say "far more" rather than "at least as much as." We simply don't need search engines and social networks. We do need food systems
> Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. - Albert Einstein, 1949
Government intervention in that market.
Companies use government regulation to gain unfair competitive advantage, raise the barrier to entry, and drive prices higher through the increased demand of government entities.
For instance, it is hard for smaller medical software companies to compete against Cerner/Leidos to provide software solutions if they are winning contracts for the entire DoD (Active and Veteran health).
If, let's say, the VA's hospital system were to be privatized, then each participating health system would have the ability to tailor their own solutions, and more companies could compete. This is a net positive in innovation for an industry that is plagued by mediocrity.
Maybe I’m just being oblivious...
I think it’s more a problem of technology enabling massive economies of scale so the big players can always be the lowest price. And also technology is so complicated that few have the resources to be able to compete. Even Intel struggles with TSMC, and how many different teams of people are there in the world that can make fabs?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/big-tobacco-di...