Full disclosure, I know that this isn’t everyone’s goal, but this is HN after all!
I guess don’t try to contribute to society then.
What you are describing isnt a hacker mentality, it’s one of an MBA graduate whose sole purpose in life is to maximize their own wealth. The idea that such a mentality is linked to this forum shows how far hacker culture has fallen and is deeply sad.
If you raise a second round at $15M, next year you owe $76k, so on. This creates an impossible situation for a founder of, let’s say, a fission reactor startup.
I could be wrong also, I was curious to hear a real life Norwegian’s thought about it.
A system like this only serves entrenched interests, not entrepreneurs or workers. Want to make a life saving drug? Have to sell off ownership of your company or use runway to pay taxes on something that could be absolutely worthless in the end or wind up losing control. Better off selling to Novonordisk!
The Draghi Report on EU Competitiveness raised lots of these red flags and, at last, some politicians are listening. Still, too little and too late.
https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-competitiveness/dragh...
It doesn't really discourage people from building their wealth and buying homes. It does a tiny bit - I've heard people say they rent to avoid property taxes. But barely.
So, if the middle class who do not have a lot of wealth can deal with it, I would imagine the wealthy can, too. Or, maybe they can't, because they have so much more mobility.
On the other hand, valuations for startups and even some large companies like Tesla seem to have absolutely no relation to the actual value of the company. Whereas home appraisals are, generally, based on the actual value as calculated by real metrics - like square footage and zipcode.
So, maybe it's just easier to deduce the value of a home, I don't know. Or maybe the stock market is just too irrational. Part of me wonders if the stock market is so irrational because there's no wealth tax.
It's not normally a very large issue, but I really don't like it. Most companies on the exchange makes money, and those who are not on the exchange are taxed on their assets. So in most cases it works out, but not always.
Usually owners use dividends to withdraw money to pay the tax, but that means even more tax as you have to pay tax on the dividends too.
The right side wants to remove the tax on investments, and maybe compensate by increasing the corporate tax. That way the tax on the annual result will be a bit higher, but there will be no wealth tax. This also levels the playing ground when it comes to Norwegian and foreign investors as the tax won't be based on where the owner is from.
I have worked at startups and got some worthless equity. I've also launched some (small) things on my own and am very interested in building large things, raising some money, etc.
Given OOP is actively recruiting I'm really just curious how this could effect your/their/someone in or interested in Norway's thinking when they could go anywhere in the EU or from TFA, remain in the US.
Society is not entitled to value. If you have the skills to create value for others, then you will inevitably have to use capital to actually scale it. In the process, through voluntary transactions, that enterprise might profit and grow - creating more value for others in the process. The question is really: who profits? I think your perspective is exceedingly misplaced in that, by necessity, it intrinsically hands control of each new innovation to said MBA-types. If a society drafts policies that make it extremely difficult to take control of your own innovation and scale it according to your own wishes, then you are implicitly leaving that work to others who (more often than not) will not share your philosophies. If a society wants to enact policies that make it difficult for a person to take ownership over their own innovations, then they should not be shocked when it becomes extremely difficult to appeal to innovators in the first place. Instead of realizing that the commentor wants to take command of the destiny of their innovations, you go down this peculiar moralizing argument that's orthogonal to their entire point. How do you know they haven't created more value for society than you have, and why are you so comfortable demanding the nature of that value creation happen on your terms?
Also, this forum is managed by a VC firm. They explicitly support people taking charge of their own creations and scaling that to society. People are allowed to ask if a society has created legitimate bottlenecks to accomplishing that.
However, your critique of the wealth tax on unrealized gains is a big problem more generally. I have some interaction with the startup ecosystem these days here. Anecdotally, I have seen several founders choose to incorporate elsewhere in Europe or the US because of it. Unfortunately, it's incredibly hard to quantify how many do not stay here because of it.
This aspect of the tax has had significant opposition for years, but nothing ever seems to come from it.
Opposition to tax on realized gains/assets is less vocal. Someone else here characterized that part as similar to property taxes in the US and I think that is fairly accurate.
Details on what is taxed how much, if you are interesed: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/get-the-taxes-ri...
ETA: we are looking for evolutionary biologists. Not many entrepreneurial personalities here, more like a lot of bird watchers (I say this lovingly). Over in the groups with translation potential is a different story of course.
> ETA: we are looking for evolutionary biologists. Not many entrepreneurial personalities here, more like a lot of bird watchers
In this case I’m sure that I’d be tempted to come to Norway and learn how ø is pronounced.