Comment by gota | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gota | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree almost completely. I understand your concerns - but they are based on weighing personal freedom above all else, and I just don't. I think there's a tradeoff there and it is favorable in favor of disclosing tax information.

To your points:

> gold-diggers

I'm not sure if this is an idiomatic term and out of my grasp, but if you mean that people will get romantically involved with others because of their money... this is a non-issue. Happy to debate it further, but it seems so silly and self-apparent that we shouldn't care at all about it

> Invasion of privacy

Arguably, but as long as only a minimum amount of whats is public, with only the lump-sums published, I think its fine in context.

> It's almost as bad as having medical conditions and STIs test results listed publicly.

I think these are very different things, the difference is not just of severity. They are different classes of things. Financial information relates to money, which only makes sense in a society (money is for trade). A disease's effects are personal. When they aren't, you are obligated to disclose them and/or to comply to other rules (for example, to quarantine).

> Facilitating public exposure of counting other people's money doesn't help anyone except the rich to know if you can fight them in court or how much to bribe them.

I think the experience where this has been applied is precisely the opposite - the rich are the ones affected the most. And - if your justice can be bought, the problem has less to do with the knowledge that the other can't find back and more to do with the legal system in the first place.

> Fight wealth inequality with income-&-holdings-proportional fines; simple, government-calculated graduated taxes without complicated exemptions; elimination of corporate/wealth welfare; and expand economic-advancement-oriented welfare to those who aren't super-rich who can use it.

Can't argue with that, even if I wanted to, in fewer than 15 pages. Complex stuff!

>>but they are based on weighing personal freedom above all else

and this is largely the primary difference between American Culture /Politics and the rest of the world, specifically European nations

European nations have always been more collectivist in nature, where the US was founded on Individualism, and Individual Freedom.

There are signs that the US is losing this desire, and it saddens me because unlike you I do value personal freedom above all else, and I think the world needs a nation that continues to put personal freedom above everything else.

Perhaps they are losing this desire because it doesn't provide the well being it promises? Because personal freedom has become a meme abused by ultra rich to disable any effort to fix systemic problems in the US?

Except that is not true at all by any objective measure. [1]

The Ultra Rich do not use Personal freedom to disable efforts, it uses Government Regulation to disable efforts, the Rich LOVE big government why do you think many billionaires vote Democrat, it enables them to control the economy to ensure the poor are kept poor and dependent on government. In the end we should look to Smash the State, Eat the Rich, and expand personal freedom [2]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg

[2]https://c4ss.org/content/30085

The problems in the US are primarily due government regulations breaking markets in things like education, medicine, and housing.

The framework of individualism vs. collectivism is a complicated (and pretty fraught!) sociological construct. Scholars hotly debate whether individualism/collectivism applies to individuals, societies, or some mix of the two. Individualism also exists along a spectrum (if it even exists at all!) While there might be some connection here, it seems a vast oversimplification of cultures/individual attitudes to say that GP's view on Finnish taxation mechanics is a direct result of individualism/collectivism.

Sadly all good discussions quickly become more complex than our threshold for undertanding without in deptghresearch...

If you have any good (and brief!) resources on this please post them; I'd like to glance at how deep this discusson goes

Two important foundational works are Markus and Kitayama's Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation, and Triandis' Individualism and Collectivism. I am not a social psychologist so I don't have a really simple introduction that I can recommend (due to lack of familiarity!). But I have seen how, in a related field, overly simplistic and un-nuanced applications of what is actually a pretty complicated framework has lead to shoddy research and bad conclusions. That's why I called it out here.

> think the world needs a nation that continues to put personal freedom above everything else.

And you think that the US does that?

Exercising personal freedom necessitates having the material and mental resources to buy stuff, to be able to move from place to place, to change jobs, etc. It seems to me that a plausible proxy measure for personal freedom is social mobility, the likelihood that you will be better off than your parents. As far as I remember the country with highest social mobility is Denmark.

The US has pretty good Social Mobility as well, it is complete myth that the "rich" in the US is stagnate, most of the Billionaires in the US are 1st Generation Billionaires, this highlights there are income and social mobility.

As a personal anecdote, I am many times better of income and wealth wise than my parents even though we have the same education level and seemingly the same income opportunities, yet I have made better choices with my finances (learning from their [bad] example). My sibling is the same. One of my parents has zero retirement savings and will live off SocSec (likely with the assistance of me and my sibling). My other parent has slightly more savings but not by much and has lots of debt, both are within 5 years of SocSec retirement Age

> As a personal anecdote, I am many times better of income and wealth wise than my parents even though we have the same education level and seemingly the same income opportunities

Slightly off topic - I'd wager the overwhelming majority of the HN posters are signficantly better-off than their parents, solely by virtue of being tech-workers. We tend to forget, but at no point in capitalism's history has such a numerous caste of white-collar knowledge workers been so well compensated as we are now

In your case it may well be mostly because of better financial decisions (especially if you are orders of magnitude better off, which is hard to do without consistent investment in any case), but for most of us this is also true just by 'placement luck'

> this is a non-issue.

Who are you to have the gall to claim conclusive knowledge of an unknowable without a shred of evidence? How do you think gold-diggers and con-artists work, hang-around at airports, golf-courses, and investment brokerages waiting for rappers with the most gold chains?

> I think its fine in context.

That's your opinion that you're deciding for other people. It's the only number that matters and yet you're stilling trying hard to trivialize it.

> And - if your justice can be bought,

Nope, you automatically lept entirely in the wrong direction: it's not the justice who can be bought that is the problem, but the rich knowing how to calculate exactly how to exploit and buy-off the poor. Think Indecent Proposal or Bhopal rather than some Western movie about a crooked town sheriff.

I think you're being downvoted our of tone, rather than content. So let me respond in reverse order, as the first point seems to be the most emotional for you

>Nope, you automatically lept entirely in the wrong direction: it's not the justice who can be bought that is the problem, but the rich knowing how to calculate exactly how to exploit and buy-off the poor. Think Indecent Proposal or Bhopal rather than some Western movie about a crooked town sheriff.

I absolutely think that the core issue is that the legal system can 'be bought', i.e., it can bankrupt people even if they are right. Reforming that shouldn't be completely impossible and would by definition solve the niche problem you are describing. Btw, as a rule _any_ corporation can sue _any_ non-famously rich person and be sure that they threat of litigation costs will weight in their favor. Disclosed tax info worsens nothing from the current status quo.

> That's your opinion that you're deciding for other people.

It is opinion, yes. But all laws are someone's opinion 'deciding for other people'. And I mean absolutely all laws, even the most basic ones like the right to live or to have private property. It's all social constructs, and we decide which ones stand

> Who are you to have the gall to claim conclusive knowledge of an unknowable without a shred of evidence? How do you think gold-diggers and con-artists work, hang-around at airports, golf-courses, and investment brokerages waiting for rappers with the most gold chains?

I must say I'm surprised this issue seems important to you (and again - completely irrelevant to me). I absolutely don't care about something that I've only ever heard about in soap operas and have never, ever, heard of an example that bothered me in real life. I'm curious what makes this a relevant issue in your view, but I understand if its personal and you don't want to explain. But if you don't have any personal biases, let me argue that the problem of gold diggers is primarily a problem for the gold-dug (?). If a rich person doesn't want to marry/have a relationship with a person that only likes them for their money... then don't. I don't care, and I think nobody should

> If a rich person doesn't want to marry/have a relationship with a person that only likes them for their money... then don't.

I think the claim is that you don't know whether a person is only interested in you for your money, and that this colors every social interaction you have, romantic or otherwise, with a undertone of worrying that any generosity you display is being exploited by someone who will abandon you the moment the money runs out. Cf fair-weather friends, miserliness, etc.

Who are you to have the gall...

Whoa, relax. ISTM GP is probably a typical human. "Gold-diggers" are not and have never been a major threat to reasonably well-adjusted people. For weirdos who temporarily possess more money than they deserve, perhaps "gold-diggers" are a spice of life. Fools and wealth are soon parted, but that's true no matter what gets published.

> That's your opinion that you're deciding for other people

Others have spoken to your other points, but as for this, yeah, exactly.

We're talking about how we'd organize society (or some aspect of it), the basis of which involves making decisions for other people, in the sense of developing rules that hopefully people will abide by as participants in the society even if they disagree.

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