Ireland to close corporate tax loophole used by Google and others

The average effective corporate tax rate is also quite a bit higher for the US than other developed countries; according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank, 27.9% versus an OECD average of 15.9%. [1 citing 2] The right wing think-tank AEI reported a smaller disparity of about 9% a few years earlier. [3] For what it's worth, these rates are fairly variable over the years.

So "huge numbers" seems like quite a stretch.

Moreover, I used the broader term "policies" rather than "rates" for a reason. The US's worldwide taxation scheme, for instance, is in itself problematic.

[1] http://barbwire.com/2014/10/15/analysis-are-us-corporate-tax...

[2] http://www.doingbusiness.org/~/media/GIAWB/Doing%20Business/...

[3] http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/taxes/rep...

AMT is a farce created by people who don't understand math. Here's the simplest example: Suppose you have a company with a billion dollars in revenue and a billion dollars in expenses. It has no profit. It will pay no taxes. AMT will only cause it to fold because expenses + taxes now exceeds revenue. The same will be true of any company with net profit less than the minimum tax rate.

The same applies to personal income AMT, the only reason it hasn't imploded in on itself in the same way is that rich individuals typically have a higher percentage of "disposable income" than business entities, so instead the AMT "only" makes rich people donate less money to charity and other causes we considered sufficiently worthy to make tax deductible until the AMT decided to put them back on the same footing as yachts and caviar.

Just to reiterate... I'd be sad about this if the other party involved had been any other country... Trans-Dniester, Sealand, Syria, Zimbabwe, whoever.

Of course not.

I also don't understand the obsession with the market as rigidly defined by Anarcho-Capitalists.

The anarcho-capitalist position doesn't define markets particularly rigidly at all. "voluntary exchange" is pretty much it. How much more liberal a definition are you looking for?

Not all human exchange that leads to the benefits of market forces needs to be done through currency and its near analogues.

Agreed. I'm not sure why you think that position is at odds with anything I've said though.

As soon as there are two people and their Rights and Liberties come at odds, it is like starting from scratch every time. Who's Rights and Liberty trumps whos?

Again, this is where the optimism comes in. I'm optimistic that most conflicts can be resolved peacefully. Where they can't, there isn't - at the end of the day - any way I can see to prevent someone from using superior force to vanquish someone who possesses less strength. But that doesn't mean that we should institutionalize the use of force as a routine part of how we conduct business with each other.

Just like North Koreans are not coerced at all and they've happily agreed to that system.

> Think about it: how can people simultaneously be too dumb to do and see what is best for them under their current system but would be able to function just fine under if under a more pure market force dominated Anarcho-Capitalist framework?

Because we know North Koreans would do just fine with less coercion, and we extend that same 'less-coercion' line of thinking to everyone.

> Having diverse means of exchange seems more robust to me.

Why does the federal government then not allow for competing currencies to the dollar? Why can't my employer pay me in gold (although 2 or 3 states have legalized this now - I wonder why!)? Why does all currency exchange have to be homogenized?

You're speaking against ancap without actually having read any of its literature. I can tell by the silly arguments you're using, and the fact you can't see the propaganda you're fed.

Get reading.

Marx spent large parts of his life criticising the idea that this was easy, and criticising the idea of the "inherent goodness of human nature".

On the contrary, Marxism assumes that it is human nature to first of all satisfy our own basic needs. In the German Ideology, Marx made the point that if a socialist revolution were to happen in an under-developed economy (like say Russia, or China, or Cuba, or North Korea, or Vietnam at the times of their respective "revolutions"), then redistribution would only make want common, and the same class struggles would reassert themselves. It was Lenin who laid the groundwork for ignoring that central part of Marx' of theses - a part he kept repeating in various contexts throughout his life.

Because a vital part of Marxism is the idea that society moves through phases that are dictated by social and economic conditions for production, and which "traps" us all. Marx did not see the capitalist as evil, nor did he see the workers as good - he saw everyone as effectively being forced into roles they either lived up to or lost. E.g. a capitalist that failed to act like a capitalist would go bankrupt and enter the working classes.

It was not "inherent goodness" Marx expected to bring a socialist revolution, but the working classes rising up in anger as capitalisms focus on increased productivity eventually reaches a point where the way of further increasing productivity makes capitalism itself fail as it runs out of fresh markets to expand into, and turns inwards on itself, with wages and jobs eventually being the only thing to cut. Couple this with the expectation that the ruling classes will refuse to yield to popular demand, but instead will use the means of oppression available to them.

The only reason a socialist revolution is considered necessary by Marxists is the assumptions that humans are not "inherently good", or at least not "good enough". But nor are they evil: It is natural to want to keep what you have, and so natural for the ruling classes to resist.

> Produce as much as you can, take as much as you need, what could possibly go wrong? > > (Spoiler alert: pretty much everything)

Of course no system has ever attempted that kind of distribution, and Marx explicitly warned (e.g. in Critique of the Gotha Program) that this was a long range goal for an advanced, well developed communist society, and that in the intermediate stages leading up to a socialist revolution, and during socialism, he saw it as more realistic to aim for a gradual transformation of the modes of production and to gradually redistribute through changes to taxation and salaries and welfare systems - not some "free for all" overthrow of all existing structure. In fact this is a defining difference between Marxism and the various anarchist ideologies (which tends to advocate the immediate destruction of the state to various degrees)

Even Leninist and subsequent bastardisations of Marxism kept to this - in large part I suspect because it became a convenient excuse for the various party elites to keep the masses in check while they lived in luxury.

But you haven't grown up enough to avoid making appeals to authority in order to justify a moral high ground.

I remember when I was 20 and I believed that those that were older than me knew more than I did because they were grown ups. Then I learned knowing is hard work, lots of reading involved, and most people avoid the legwork and jump straight to the "I know better now that I'm a grown up" because few call them out on it.

Grow up.

Whether it was "better" or "worse" is a discussion I'll leave to the consequentialists.