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Comment by koenigdavidmj | Hacker News Reader

I bought a car a couple counties away from where I live for the lower sales tax rate than my home county. How is this ethically any different than that (other than the scale)?

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Did you create three shell companies in different states, some with no reporting requirements, in order to carry out this purchase?

Your point is a good one. But it's hard for the nonspecialist to avoid associating this kind of tax avoidance with the behavior of Enron sometime back.

When somebody gets busted for computer hacking, the common line on here is that an activity's difficulty has very little to do with its legality. A for loop and curl are really simple, but just as illegal under the right circumstances.

You're doing the same thing: suggesting that the ethicality of a practice depends on its legal complexity.

I think my qualm has to do with the impression that the legal complexity is being used to subvert the manifest intent of the tax law. This in my mind is neither black nor white -- it's in the gray area of the law. But I'm not a lawyer.

In your position, you actually have a requirement to pay the correct sales tax to your state based on where you live. This is more complex than 'I wasn't charged it, so I don't owe it'

You are breaking the law if you do not pay what you owe.

Google is using the various laws of these countries, and treaty agreements, to avoid taxes in one place to pay them at a different (much lower) rate in another.

Google is not breaking the law.

He said county, not state.

Well I'd argue that the ethical difference is fundamentally the scale. How many lives could be changed if they paid taxes according to their social contract? Poverty, crappy healthcare and soaring incarceration are all problems that need money to alleviate.

The money they saved isn't destroyed. They can use it for all kinds of good things now---like giving it back to their shareholders.

i do hope you're kidding..

They have a fiduciary duty to do this to make more money for their shareholders. They have no enforceable social contract to provide taxes more than what they can legally pay. They can be sued by their shareholders for not using these schemes

Not saying this is right, but this is the way the law works right now.

I'm referring to the tacit social contract between the state and its citizens, in this case, the idea that the state supports the entrepreneur in the beginning, so that later the entrepreneur can support the state, if they can.

I'm probably butchering the term, so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

I mis-understood who the 'their' was in your comment. I agree with you on this point.

There is an argument that allowing companies these tax breaks brings jobs to your country instead of somewhere else, and this brings prosperity. Certainly Ireland worked this way in the 90s to get their tech scene started. Locally, cities do this too - X year tax breaks to put your factory here instead of there is a common thing.

Is the social contract satisfied by just the generation of good paying jobs where there were none previously?

So how did the European states affected by this support Google, the entrepreneur, in the beginning?

It's not different, but I am surprised your country doesn't enforce those taxes through a use tax. In California, we have nearby states with much lower auto taxes, but when you import the car you have to pay the difference in the purchase state's tax and California's the moment you register the car.

He's talking about counties, not state. Within California difference by county can be a full percentage point http://www.boe.ca.gov/cgi-bin/rates.cgi

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