The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder.
I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200 million came in from he Faroe Islands the software would flag it as “possibly” an unlawful transfer. It made sure the books were “kosher”.
So I asked him
Me: oh ok, so then the software blocked those transactions?
Him: no.
Me: Well did it flag them so they would investigate it?
Him: no.
Me: What did it do then?
Him: It just flagged them.
Me: just flagged them? ... so what did it do? What was it for?
Him: It was designed so when the Sachs managing team are called to court they can say “oh yeah we’re very sorry our software flagged that as a suspicious activity. We’re really sorry, won’t happen again”. And then they’ll get a 200 million fine on a 3 billion operation.
By law they don’t have to do anything else, so they don’t.
So a positive thing about Brexit would be that it makes it easier to declare war on the Faroe islands... Only need to fend off the British not all Europeans.
> The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder.
It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.
I am not even sure one can fight tax evasion as the EU as a whole without giving the EU a tax surveillance authority none of the member states want to give it. It's the same thing as a EU-wide immigration issue. Given the EU border powers over all Schengen states? Or just accept that this is going to be contentious forever? The EU is geared towards the latter which is not on the whole a bad thing.
But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.
The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.
The EU requires member countries to let money cross their borders, and grants corporations the right to pay taxes for the entire EU in the member country of their choosing.
Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.
Yeah. I am in favor of a high tax on absentee ownership of real estate. Deduct the property where you live and where you work. Everything else gets taxed heavily.
We should exempt rent-to-own contracts. If the contract vests ownership over a 20 year period or less, then it should count as owned by both sides for the purposes of this tax proposal. Bonus, we reduce the influence of banks.
It's pointless. One can have multiple temporary residences. The Swiss have already solved this. You pay the same amount of tax regardless if you keep the property empty, live in it or rent it. It's calculated as a percentage of average rent in that area which gets updated with market prices every 6 months or so. They also have low VAT and corp taxes.
The key word in your comment is "we". "we" don't do that - the government does. And as you yourself indicate - they don't do so in the public interest, they do so in the investors' interest.
Also - they shouldn't be a _domestic_ investment vehicle either.
- let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need
- actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony?
- within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto
- oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garbage on the floors. So we sell these houses at discount.
It doesn't always work like this. In the Netherlands you can find big parts of the cities built by housing corporations with people renting them for decades, yet very few of them you can define as ghettos
First, there are buses going to Long Island beaches (Jones Beach, specifically).
Second, a place becomes a ghetto not because there's no nice park nearby. A district becomes a ghetto because people who live there deface the walls and throw garbage on the streets.
"Mayor John V. Lindsay, who took office in 1965, was determined to break this cycle, to put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods. He tried, memorably, in 1971 in Forest Hills, Queens, figuring that the community’s predominantly liberal Jewish population would not object to the arrival of three 24-story towers. He was wrong. The construction site was soon overrun with angry protesters."
I have to wonder, does anyone, yourself included, want projects in their neighborhood? And more importantly, is there evil dirt in 'bad' neighborhoods that makes housing projects become high-crime ghettos, and if we just build them in middle-class neighborhoods with good dirt instead, everyone's going to behave and make it a nice place to live?
I can tell you, living in an extremely liberal, formerly low-crime small city that in the past decade decided to "put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods" and even offered section 8 vouchers to random people from a big city hundreds of miles away to move in, it's been a catastrophe. Spreading crime and dysfunction around isn't really better than quarantining it.
I'm not an expert in this area, but I think the general line of thinking is that it's concentration of poverty that causes these kinds of problems in the first place. Now that the problems exist, spreading the poverty around as you point out won't make the problems go away.
I'm sure there has been research done on this, I will try to find some references.
Building houses can help prevent homelessness, but it can't treat the socioeconomic causes that makes folks homeless in the first place. You can't "just" build houses - you have to treat income disparity and the massive wealth gap at the same time.
This article is painting mobility as a bad thing, but it also has a good side. China's capital controls are a big part of how it oppresses people: if they could just leave, China would have no ability to make itself into a productive dystopia. The ideal situation would be if countries had to compete for everyone's presence, but as it stands limitations on mobility mean that only the very powerful can leap over the boundaries and have countries compete for them.
Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would).
The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.
The question should be, how can we give the average person the freedoms that the elites have, not how can we enslave the Chinese elites in the way we've enslaved the average Chinese person.
Since the freedom in question is economic mobility, it's kind of a moot point for the huge proportion of the U.S. population with limited incomes and little to no wealth to move around.
The first point would be policies aimed at distributing ownership of property etc. So for example we could have a high tax for:
1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work.
2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do)
A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.
For some context in case anyone was curious, it seems that approximately 1 in 30 of people worldwide live outside the country of their birth. (Of these, approximately 1 in 10 are forcibly displaced.) Also, "the largest international migratory flow from a single country of origin to a single country of destination is the 12.7 million Mexicans living in the United States"; this flow alone is approximately 1 in 600 people worldwide.
This is purely about wealth mobility for people with >$50m net worth.
People who got it through corruption at best and genocide at worst (literal genocide in a case I know in NY). The average Chinese or Russian citizen will never have the chance to move their money abroad because they have none, they will never have the chance to move themselves because legal immigration is expensive.
You seem to be talking of closed borders, not capital restrictions.
Britain and some other Western nations had capital controls until around the 1980s, without using them to oppress people. The millions who fled revolutionary China, without their capital, seeded Hong Kong and Taiwan with the huge population growth that made them what they are today.
Western nations have used capital controls to oppress people. The Nazis, for example, used capital controls to both oppress people and to help fund their war machine via monetary policy.
Capital controls don't rule out freedom, nor rule in oppression. I doubt you'd suggest Switzerland, the US, Britain and the rest were oppressive by mere dint of having capital controls before Bretton Woods was destroyed.
Giving the Nazi example of an oppressive regime being oppressive doesn't change that - they were oppressive via nearly all the other tools of free democracies too. Property seizures and taking away all freedom of movement was far more symptomatic of being oppressive. OP's China example is a place that is oppressive in many ways, but far from being one of the main means of oppression, capital control has been liberalised hugely in recent years. Freedom of movement, to emigrate, to demonstrate, etc on the other hand...
The majority of people have no interest to float around the globe without any ties to their home or culture.
The idea that this cosmopolitanism of the elites is something that the average person even cares about is a fiction peddled to maintain the status quo. If you look at the rise of populists around the globe, are they nationalists or are they hyper-libertarians who want to give John Doe the ability to move to Swasiland?
The productive 'dystopia' you're talking about isn't China, it's West Germany in 1960-1970. As the article points out, the world under Bretton Woods had strict capital controls, was everyone in the Western world living in a dystopia? Obviously not. And by the way, the average middle class person in China these days isn't exactly living under dystopic conditions either.
I absolutely don't see how taking control away from elites, restoring capital controls and national autonomy and reigning in global capital is dystopic. It was the primary development model for any country on the planet whose general population, and not just elites, are prosperous.
Really that easy huh. Why don't you ask Meng Hongwei if it's that easy, or may Fan Bing Bing if it's that easy.
When your government is willing to torture and kill you in order to get their way, and they are willing to do it on foreign soil, it doesn't seem so easy, or safe.
Tip of a giant iceberg. America's political class is corrupt to its very core and the biggest mouths are the biggest offenders. Most every US Senator got rich while being...a Senator, hmm. Insider trading is legal for them!
Then you have to factor in the intelligence agencies and the long con those groups have been running for decades now.
We the people need to stop and think about the heavy tax load (extracted at gunpoint) and consider slowing it down, or at least forcing greater accountability. We are ultimately the ones funding this growing worldwide nightmare. Every Democrat running for President wants to raise taxes, expand the government, and basically wither away our civil rights.
The city of Baltimore took in $16Billion in Federal money over a short couple year (?) period and nobody quite knows where all that money went. I'd like my refund check on that, please.
Bunch of crooked assholes in government, basically the mob.
Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular.
That tidal wave has many faces. Corbyn, Trump, Sturgeon, Brexit, AfD, Bernie, AOC, Syriza, and more. It is global, and radical, and across both the right and left.
Will it though? It's a comforting thought, but is there more to it than wishful thinking? There's a shroud of secrecy around this money, so how will all this resentment will be targeted, exactly?
> so how will all this resentment will be targeted, exactly?
If you're a Jew who knows his or her history, you probably know the answer to this question already. Jews frequently get scapegoated by populists (and others) when people are targeting "stateless money changers" regardless of the fact that most of the key players mentioned here are English, Russian, and Chinese.
Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.
IMO people earning 6 figures should still be paying more taxes than they are (I earn less than that, and I'm pretty sure I should be taxed more than I am), but they're not the people that are really the problems. It's the multi-millionaires and billionaires that are hogging a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.
Right. And our economic model needs to change to account for that scalability, because the natural constraint which previously made the system work(ish) has gone.
I would say we must adjust our political model rather than economical. Let go of 'everyone votes' democracy, to give more representation to these people in the top 1% and less to the bottom 50% who don't contribute, just take from the public. Otherwise the government will turn into charade, it already does, see Trump. How can we expect people who don't pay takes, to vote responsibly? They don't put their money on the table.
> Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of.
I disagree, they have vastly more capital than the 99% of earners below them. Unless you're comparing those 1%ers to someone like Zuckerberg specifically, there's really no way to square this statement.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings threshold to be in the top 1% of earners in 2017 was $718K.[0] That's a pretty incredible amount of annual capital for an individual. Sure, it's not enough to start a hedge fund, but even after taxes, you're able to seriously invest in things like real estate, which fewer Americans are able to do.
It's not threshold. It's an average value. Threshold is a lot, lot lower, must be around 350K. The table say those in top 1% but not top 0.1% make $492,311 on average so clearly threshold of 1% is a lot lower than even that. No figure in your sources but my bet would be it's ~$350K
But still not enough capital for the statement in the original comment to apply to them:
> There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular.
This statement is often used and is misleading without the context of income of this 1% as a percentage. So, if this 1% earns 80% of all income, then 35-40% is relatively low. I'm not sure if your intent was to mislead or just reiterate stats that you saw from some where, but please give the appropriate context and data to support you claim that this is unfair.
Except the top 1% actually earn around 20% of income (https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...). It should be obvious that they pay a disproportionately large share of taxes (relative to income) -- how could it be otherwise given that higher income means a higher tax rate?
To be global 1% means earning $32k/year (source: investopedia). It’s a catchy phrase but ironically basically any Westerner using it is part of it. The archetypal Occupy protestors clutching their latest-model iPhone in one hand and a Starbucks in the other
"1%" is a mirror that reflects human tendencies to only look jealously at those doing better than them, rather than objectively include those worse off.
I assume you got this from the Investopedia article [1]? This seems a little disingenuous, no?
To make the top 1% in terms of income, yes, it's $32k/year but to make the top 1% in terms of wealth you would need $770k in net worth, well beyond most Americans, even with assets such as an iPhone and a Starbucks coffee.
Are you referring to 1% of wealth or 1% of income? I think you are correct in regards to income as it is mid six figures[0]. But I think the general complaint about the 1% is in reference to wealth which has a cutoff of about 10 million[0]. Also I was skeptical of your claim about the 1% (of income earners) paying that much (at least in terms of income tax) but this[1] does seem to support that you are at least in the ballpark.
Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income. And their capital is passive and brings no or almost no profit (having 10M of capital and making 350K of income only 17% of which is income from capital - rest is from work - means abysmal 0.5% average return). It is in fact even less because most people who are top 1% by capital aren't top 1% by income: top 1% by capital is typically someone who bought some land on the cheap in 1950s and turned out lucky now when he's 90 years old, top 1% by income is a 30-year old Hollywood agent, Google coder, or a NYC lawyer.
These people (top 1% by capital) are as far from archetypal "sharks of capitalism" as it gets.
Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income.
Indeed. Someone who bought their house in the 70s or 80s and has now paid off their mortgage and also been contributing to a pension fund for a 40-year working life could easily retire with a “net worth” of $770k. It would be a stretch to count them as “rich”.
Even more depressing when I see co-workers, friends and family actually do that and I'm trying to climb the ladder by working hard and paying the last penny of tax I owe.
If this is a topic of interest, I can recommend this independently created documentary 'The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire'. It's the story of how Britain's elite created a financial web spanning the globe, replacing the old empire with a new financial one, running from the Commonwealth countries back to London. That's why so many overseas British territories are associated with money laundering and tax evasion. Free to watch on YouTube:
The article also mentions the folks who are made wealthy by working for those few thousand families.
> A class of enablers has arisen to help Moneylanders perform parts two and three of what Bullough describes as their eternal cycle: “steal-hide-spend”. London overflows with lawyers, bankers, accountants, estate agents, public relations advisers, luxury-goods sellers, restaurateurs and art dealers who make their living servicing criminals. They see themselves as neutral, highly skilled professionals who (mostly, anyway) work within the law.
For those interested in learning more about the invention of Eurobonds and how they destabilised the postwar Bretton Woods system by enabling free movement of capital across borders, this Guardian article is a fascinating read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/the-real-goldfi...
It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national.
Just take Apple as one example.
Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax.
This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now.
From what I recall Google started this scam and it is still the master of avoiding tax and while the populous is happy to vote in governments that turn a blind eye to this practice, it will remain a very lucrative endeavour.
Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks.
It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it.
We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing.
Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.
What you call a scam, I call healthy competition between nation-states, with the fringe benefit of keeping everyone honest.
The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.
Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.
Personally I believe that healthy is when there is a power balance between democratically controlled government and privately owned business. They should be about equal in power. In many western countries, especially the US, the power balance has shifted completely toward business. Business can dictate law and make governments compete with one another for their money.
This is obviously the wrong way around, it undermines democracy (aka the people) and benefits business owners (aka the rich). Business should compete with another, governments should set rules for their markets. If a country votes for high taxes and generous public services, this should be priced in by business, not undermined and circumvented.
>Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.
I'm not hearing anything remotely bad in this sentence.
It’s in the best interests of the owners of capital that capital be free to cross any borders with a minimum of friction, but people be stuck where they are. That’s the basic dynamic that creates this kind of situation, and it’s not accidental.
I was thinking about the super rich, recalling that story where a rich philanthropist made NYU Medical School tuition-free in a surprise announcement. I couldn't help think: why do we live in a system where there are people so rich, that we rely on their kindness for our upper-crust medical students to not have debt? Why not have an economy that limits mega-wealth so we don't need to rely on the generosity of mega-wealthy donors? The subtext here is the vast majority of mega-wealthy donors are NOT going to help the rest of us who helped build their wealth.
The problem as I see it is that accumulation of wealth-movement power (note that I did not say "accumulation of wealth" because that isn't really at thing) seems to be necessary to some extent in order to overcome collective action problems in society. Funding medical school is a great example -- nobody wants to do it, on their own, but society as a whole wants it to get done.
Either you have wealthy individuals do it, or you have the government do it. But someone has to pool a lot of resources in one place and start moving them around, if we want things like free med school to exist.
Maybe it's better if the government does it; in theory it leads to better outcomes because the government has better incentives to make good decisions with their wealth-movement power, outweighing the inefficiencies of economic centralization by ensuring that people's basic needs are met across the population. This is what a lot of leftists and liberals will argue.
Meanwhile conservatives, libertarians, etc. will point to government track records in actually implementing programs well, engaging in corruption, designing good policy, and becoming extensions of corporate interests. Not to mention generalized waste due to mismatch between "incentives to start projects" and "incentives not to spend money".
Given the plain absurdity I can't help but ask what they are high on if they think a banking system is a neccessity to loot. Banks have certainly been complict but the solution is to hold /actual bad actors/ responsible.
Perhaps rhetoric or ideology given that it is dripping with antisemitic dogwhistles taken at face value. Most of those are essentially ancient bullying charging them with being disloyal, rootless, and exploitative after repeatably persecuting them, displacing
them and forcing them into a scapegoated "dirty work" that was religiously allowee so they stood to inherit the money after their death.
Looting like that has occured through time immemorial - from the occupation of Viking, literal stealing of goods and the very literal colonialism of the East India Company and Leopold.
Once again it ammounts to absurd scapegoating - if they actually wanted to hold the kleptocrats accountable they would hold them accountable!
Their fortunes aren't going to do them much good when they are isolated from them in prison or death row.
It is the blind hierarchical normism of enforcement double standard that is the true root. Ousted dictators aren't responsible for travesties and can retire quietly while enslaved hostages are guilty of materially supporting terrorists.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200 million came in from he Faroe Islands the software would flag it as “possibly” an unlawful transfer. It made sure the books were “kosher”.
So I asked him
Me: oh ok, so then the software blocked those transactions?
Him: no.
Me: Well did it flag them so they would investigate it?
Him: no.
Me: What did it do then?
Him: It just flagged them.
Me: just flagged them? ... so what did it do? What was it for?
Him: It was designed so when the Sachs managing team are called to court they can say “oh yeah we’re very sorry our software flagged that as a suspicious activity. We’re really sorry, won’t happen again”. And then they’ll get a 200 million fine on a 3 billion operation. By law they don’t have to do anything else, so they don’t.
It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.
The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.
And if I’m not mistaken part of the reason why it went away was the EU kept giving them advice to stop it.
Also - they shouldn't be a _domestic_ investment vehicle either.
- we have people who live in subpar conditions
- let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need
- actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony?
- within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto
- oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garbage on the floors. So we sell these houses at discount.
- goto step 1
An absolutely fantastic country.
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-l...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/nyregion/how-new-york-cit...
First, there are buses going to Long Island beaches (Jones Beach, specifically).
Second, a place becomes a ghetto not because there's no nice park nearby. A district becomes a ghetto because people who live there deface the walls and throw garbage on the streets.
I have to wonder, does anyone, yourself included, want projects in their neighborhood? And more importantly, is there evil dirt in 'bad' neighborhoods that makes housing projects become high-crime ghettos, and if we just build them in middle-class neighborhoods with good dirt instead, everyone's going to behave and make it a nice place to live?
I can tell you, living in an extremely liberal, formerly low-crime small city that in the past decade decided to "put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods" and even offered section 8 vouchers to random people from a big city hundreds of miles away to move in, it's been a catastrophe. Spreading crime and dysfunction around isn't really better than quarantining it.
I'm sure there has been research done on this, I will try to find some references.
-Ah, the federal government pushed/incentivized us to give mortgages to people who have poor odds of paying them back
-Economy or housing market downturns a bit
-A bunch of people can't pay their mortgages
-Major recession
The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.
1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work.
2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do)
A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.
https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/de... https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/internation...
This is purely about wealth mobility for people with >$50m net worth.
People who got it through corruption at best and genocide at worst (literal genocide in a case I know in NY). The average Chinese or Russian citizen will never have the chance to move their money abroad because they have none, they will never have the chance to move themselves because legal immigration is expensive.
Britain and some other Western nations had capital controls until around the 1980s, without using them to oppress people. The millions who fled revolutionary China, without their capital, seeded Hong Kong and Taiwan with the huge population growth that made them what they are today.
e.g. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...
Giving the Nazi example of an oppressive regime being oppressive doesn't change that - they were oppressive via nearly all the other tools of free democracies too. Property seizures and taking away all freedom of movement was far more symptomatic of being oppressive. OP's China example is a place that is oppressive in many ways, but far from being one of the main means of oppression, capital control has been liberalised hugely in recent years. Freedom of movement, to emigrate, to demonstrate, etc on the other hand...
The idea that this cosmopolitanism of the elites is something that the average person even cares about is a fiction peddled to maintain the status quo. If you look at the rise of populists around the globe, are they nationalists or are they hyper-libertarians who want to give John Doe the ability to move to Swasiland?
The productive 'dystopia' you're talking about isn't China, it's West Germany in 1960-1970. As the article points out, the world under Bretton Woods had strict capital controls, was everyone in the Western world living in a dystopia? Obviously not. And by the way, the average middle class person in China these days isn't exactly living under dystopic conditions either.
I absolutely don't see how taking control away from elites, restoring capital controls and national autonomy and reigning in global capital is dystopic. It was the primary development model for any country on the planet whose general population, and not just elites, are prosperous.
When your government is willing to torture and kill you in order to get their way, and they are willing to do it on foreign soil, it doesn't seem so easy, or safe.
Then you have to factor in the intelligence agencies and the long con those groups have been running for decades now.
We the people need to stop and think about the heavy tax load (extracted at gunpoint) and consider slowing it down, or at least forcing greater accountability. We are ultimately the ones funding this growing worldwide nightmare. Every Democrat running for President wants to raise taxes, expand the government, and basically wither away our civil rights.
The city of Baltimore took in $16Billion in Federal money over a short couple year (?) period and nobody quite knows where all that money went. I'd like my refund check on that, please.
Bunch of crooked assholes in government, basically the mob.
It’s a depressing read.
If you're a Jew who knows his or her history, you probably know the answer to this question already. Jews frequently get scapegoated by populists (and others) when people are targeting "stateless money changers" regardless of the fact that most of the key players mentioned here are English, Russian, and Chinese.
Do it, or Chinese will do it for us.
I disagree, they have vastly more capital than the 99% of earners below them. Unless you're comparing those 1%ers to someone like Zuckerberg specifically, there's really no way to square this statement.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings threshold to be in the top 1% of earners in 2017 was $718K.[0] That's a pretty incredible amount of annual capital for an individual. Sure, it's not enough to start a hedge fund, but even after taxes, you're able to seriously invest in things like real estate, which fewer Americans are able to do.
0: https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-0-percent-reaches-highest-wag...
> There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular.
>top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes
Radiolab (I think?) had an episode on this.
Even the rich are jealous of their "1%".
To make the top 1% in terms of income, yes, it's $32k/year but to make the top 1% in terms of wealth you would need $770k in net worth, well beyond most Americans, even with assets such as an iPhone and a Starbucks coffee.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
Not at all - from the comment I was replying to “Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of.”
But my wider point being that it is just used to mean “anyone slightly wealthier than me”.
https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/[0]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...
These people (top 1% by capital) are as far from archetypal "sharks of capitalism" as it gets.
Indeed. Someone who bought their house in the 70s or 80s and has now paid off their mortgage and also been contributing to a pension fund for a 40-year working life could easily retire with a “net worth” of $770k. It would be a stretch to count them as “rich”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8
> A class of enablers has arisen to help Moneylanders perform parts two and three of what Bullough describes as their eternal cycle: “steal-hide-spend”. London overflows with lawyers, bankers, accountants, estate agents, public relations advisers, luxury-goods sellers, restaurateurs and art dealers who make their living servicing criminals. They see themselves as neutral, highly skilled professionals who (mostly, anyway) work within the law.
It has simply got easier and in fact the group of people who can attempt it, though tiny, has grown much larger.
Just take Apple as one example.
Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax.
This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now.
From what I recall Google started this scam and it is still the master of avoiding tax and while the populous is happy to vote in governments that turn a blind eye to this practice, it will remain a very lucrative endeavour.
It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it.
We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing.
Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.
This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades.
As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia:
https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-...
If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individual they would be facing decades in prison.
These businesses are actively stealing the citizens from their essential services.
The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.
Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.
Personally I believe that healthy is when there is a power balance between democratically controlled government and privately owned business. They should be about equal in power. In many western countries, especially the US, the power balance has shifted completely toward business. Business can dictate law and make governments compete with one another for their money.
This is obviously the wrong way around, it undermines democracy (aka the people) and benefits business owners (aka the rich). Business should compete with another, governments should set rules for their markets. If a country votes for high taxes and generous public services, this should be priced in by business, not undermined and circumvented.
I'm not hearing anything remotely bad in this sentence.
Either you have wealthy individuals do it, or you have the government do it. But someone has to pool a lot of resources in one place and start moving them around, if we want things like free med school to exist.
Maybe it's better if the government does it; in theory it leads to better outcomes because the government has better incentives to make good decisions with their wealth-movement power, outweighing the inefficiencies of economic centralization by ensuring that people's basic needs are met across the population. This is what a lot of leftists and liberals will argue.
Meanwhile conservatives, libertarians, etc. will point to government track records in actually implementing programs well, engaging in corruption, designing good policy, and becoming extensions of corporate interests. Not to mention generalized waste due to mismatch between "incentives to start projects" and "incentives not to spend money".
Perhaps rhetoric or ideology given that it is dripping with antisemitic dogwhistles taken at face value. Most of those are essentially ancient bullying charging them with being disloyal, rootless, and exploitative after repeatably persecuting them, displacing them and forcing them into a scapegoated "dirty work" that was religiously allowee so they stood to inherit the money after their death. Looting like that has occured through time immemorial - from the occupation of Viking, literal stealing of goods and the very literal colonialism of the East India Company and Leopold.
Once again it ammounts to absurd scapegoating - if they actually wanted to hold the kleptocrats accountable they would hold them accountable! Their fortunes aren't going to do them much good when they are isolated from them in prison or death row.
It is the blind hierarchical normism of enforcement double standard that is the true root. Ousted dictators aren't responsible for travesties and can retire quietly while enslaved hostages are guilty of materially supporting terrorists.