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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

Capital gains tax is a parasitical tax that punishes people for being responsible with their after-tax money. It also creates massive, massive loopholes that can be abused.

The fairest solution is to scrap CGT and associated capital loss write-offs.

This allows the middle class to thrive by investing in productive enterprises and not getting taxed yet again to do so.

It's the worst kind of tax that punishes success by stealing your after-tax money.

As for your appeal to nation, the US will waste your money on slaughtering Afghanistani children with bombs and handing out cash to serial fraudsters (look up how many people on Social Security are actually real). Most tax money is wasted by government.

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There are two groups slicing the worker's cheese. One is the state, they claim tax. The other is the investors, they claim profit.

Calling out other parasites, don't forget you also are one.

This can only be true if you hold humans in such low regard that you think they cannot make an informed choice about where to work and under which conditions.

Any example of a cooperative usually descends into chaos, an example being worker's unions which descend into criminality, corruption and pure evil (teacher's unions regularly defend sexual predator teachers, for example) more often than not.

It's also a pure fallacy and just plain wrong to suggest I claim profit from Cloudflare. Cloudflare has not and does not issue dividends, meaning all of the profit is reinvested in business operations or goes to the workers.

As an investor, I don't see a single cent of profit in this case.

> sexual predator teachers

You need to chill, dude. I am not defending child molesters. I am not even claiming that capital investment is evil. I am simply pointing out the fact that the relation is parasitic.

> As an investor, I don't see a single cent of profit in this case.

Then you aren't paying capital gains tax either, so I don't see the problem.

I'm curious though, do you also not expect to get any profit for this particular investment in the future? When you have got back your inflation adjusted initial capital + a modest interest + a reward for the risk, do you mail your share certificates back to Cloudflare with a note, thank you, good doing business with you?

You don't appear to understand how either stocks or CGT works.

Cloudflare does not issue dividends. Dividends are distributions of profit. If I bought Cloudflare stock at $30 and sold at $90, for example, the $60 profit I'm making isn't taken from Cloudflare, it's paid by the buyer on the other end of the stock trade, which is usually an institution or a retail buyer.

I'm not and are never "taking profit" from Cloudflare, in fact I provide them liquidity and also allow them to dilute my ownership in order to pay their employees in stock grants.

Selling shares doesn't really mean the company is hurt by it, especially since I'm a retail investor who doesn't have the capital to impact the price even a single cent.

Owning their stock when they aren't paying dividends is a bet that either growth of the company will inflate the price so I can profit, or it's a bet that they'll one day issue dividends (not anytime soon).

From the company POV the capital investment is the outstanding shares. The shares need to be kept happy with some combination of immediate profit and continuosly growing projection of future profit (i.e. investing into growth), or they start to lose value in the market and become even more unhappy. Eventually investing into growth runs into diminishing returns and immediate profit becomes the dominant component.

The profit you get from buying and selling on the market is either a result of the shares being kept happy, or taking advantage of market mechanics. The latter is mostly a form of gambling that doesn't produce value.

It's not parasitic, it's symbiotic. Without profit-seeking capital, there would be no opportuinities for productive labor.

It starts off as symbiotic (you give capital for future profit), but becomes parasitic (you just keep leeching profit without giving anything more in return).

At least, that is what I plan to do. Stop working and live as a full-time parasite as soon as I can afford it. Maybe others here are more altruistic.

Buying a non-dividend stock and selling it a higher price does not cost the company a cent. The profit doesn't come from the company at all.

You can't think of any reason people would provide productive labor without their being profit-seeking capital? Do you really, truly believe that? If you do, I have a bridge to sell you.

> This allows the middle class to thrive by investing in productive enterprises and not getting taxed yet again to do so.

The same money isn't taxed again. Only the gains on top of that.

Some sort of tax on wealth or the proceeds of that wealth is necessary, otherwise you end up with a society where only the middle class pays tax while the people who benefit the most from society, the rich, live tax-free. It's either this or a simple wealth tax.

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