Can you explain how that works for someone ignorant like myself?
* Set up a company in the country where you'd like to pay taxes, and give it all of your intellectual property.
* Set up subsidiaries in the countries where you don't want to pay taxes. Have them pay licensing fees to the first company for the IP, making sure to set the licensing fee high enough that the subsidiaries don't make much profit.
* Now most of your profit lives in the first country, no matter how much business you do elsewhere.
A concept invented by and for lawyers. Call it imaginary property.
If the middle ground uses a term to describe a thing, then the wings have to use it as well. Or there has to be a real push by someone spending a lot of money on advertising to recast the concept. If someone goes around at the individual level making a thing of talking about "imaginary property" they are just going to look like an isolated crank. It isn't helpful.
Tax-evasion done by money-transfers based on fictional value attributions of something. Seems exactly like "imaginary property" to me.
I agree with both of you. I think the concept has to be recast, and that's going to be a very hard thing to do. I think a lot of money and effort was spent to cast these things as "Intellectual Property" in the first place.
However, it was on HN that I first saw the term "Imaginary Property", and I've seen that more and more lately. So there's hope. If usage of the term grows exponentially, it might happen.
(Talking as someone who likes the concept of private property).