Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

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motohagiography

The challenge with it is that this doesn't generalize to any shared principle and it's cynical realpolitik dressed up as network science.

I'd argue this paper is less a work of scholarship than an example of collusive, astroturfed, agitprop, where even though russia's oligarchs are an easy target because they are still new money and retain the taint of trade from the corruption that produced their fortunes, the authors are casting aspersions on highly regulated businesses that provide the financial rails for investing and preserving pensions and sovereign wealth.

The only reason you can insure anything or have long term financial instruments at all is because of special purpose vehicles that persist longer than the whims of a given regional governing party. These vehicles are infrastructure that provides financial stability for capital flows that facilitate social stability and growth. I remember the eurozone sovereign debt crisis', and to me the paper just looks like another (tawdry) setup for blaming "speculators and international financiers" for the failed technocratic policies of their peers own makings.

The approach of "going upstream," is guilt by association, and it's unprincipled overreach. The paper is entertaining, and I'm glad that the networkX python library has become so accessible that social activists can use it, but I think we should hold the authors to a higher standard.

From my naive perspective it almost reads that you won't be able to receive your money on the proper hongkong HSBC select account and are upset about it

Reality is that tax dodging is a wildly out of control problem, and worse it is considered to be de defacto standard to even run a business at all. From south Dakota to the city of London and beyond. It is really a problem

The outlash against oligarchs has almost nothing to do with tax dodging. If anything they pay many thousand times more than they consume in public services (they're not even in London the whole year and the property tax alone on one penthouse is probably more than the average person pays in taxes in a decade). It is more about sanctions right now than anything. This paper promotes the "facilitators" idea that if we could just eliminate a few key offshore providers we could stop the oligarchs right in their tracks. They have some nice theoretical calculations and visualizations that justify this. I think in the real world the outcome would be very different because there is no reason to think that a 1000 more "facilitators" wouldn't pop up wherever the new cool jurisdiction is. Are we really expecting the whole world to leave trillions of dollars on the table?

Property tax in London? You mean ... council tax? For a penthouse in the City - 2,194 pa. There is a one time sales tax (stamp duty) but that's not what you mean I think.

Oligarchs owning property in London are not forced to contribute to the London coffers .... not at all

https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/council-tax/council...

So... I am supposed to believe that ultra high income people that are known to engage in a high degree of conspicuous consumption while using minimal government services contribute nothing to the budget? They don't pay way more in VAT than the average person? They don't create any construction employment that in turn is taxed? I'm not saying they're good people or anything but if anything it seems like their obvious benefit is that they contribute to the economy.

The original post was about property tax specifically. Walk down Park Lane at night and look at the dark million dollar apartments - if no-one lives there there is not a lot of "trickle down" happening - the maids, the drivers, the restaurants, the money does not flow unless they are home. But the point of super rich is to avoid states and their taxes and capricious democratic decisions.

Yachts are useful for that.

The reason I don't think it's a serious problem is that governments operate on the counterfactual that they can legally collect enough to fund their patronage to key coalitions.

They can't, and if they have their own currency, their debt never comes due because they can steal it from savers through inflation. But they prefer to play this game, and that requires trading that debt to someone, and those someones are pension funds and other governments who use these vehicles in jurisdictions that can't easily be looted by said debtor states. The last government to collapse because of tax evasion was Greece, and the reason people evaded there was because it was complex, inconsistent and corrupt. The evasion facilities were built in by design, usually under the auspices of "justice," for favoured parties. The state is happy because when everyone is compromised, they have the discretion to step around the laws and always get someone on something, and blackmail and extortion are more efficient than courts.

That said, this perspective is from a basic disagreement in principle with managerialism. We pay what we are legally obligated to, and if the rules are so complex as to be inconsistent and exploitable, and governments are too mercurial to risk leaving capital within their reach, it's their own fault. The whole rich-people-bad argument is ugly and insincere because it advocates an extortionate state that panders to smaller human urges, and so I don't have a lot of tolerance for it.

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