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Comment by rbg246 | Hacker News Reader

This argument relies on that it is impossible to stop rich people from successfully evading tax.

I find it hard to believe in the age of tracking that we live in now that banks and consumer transactions that it wouldn't be hard to implement proper tax evasion tracking across borders. This is purely an issue of there being no political will to do this.

It would be even easier to just cut off the tax havens from the global economy - make it illegal for banks to conduct transactions with those banks / branches located in those havens, strand those assets from the global economy destroying the value of those bank accounts.

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I was talking about avoiding taxes, which is legal, as opposed to evading taxes, which is illegal.

Though as C. Northcote Parkinson wrote, the higher the tax rates, the more people will engage in tax evasion. If it's high enough, it'll become the national sport.

Imagine that we are designing an MMORPG world. We know that individual player would seek to maximize their "gains" and to advance their ranking in the game as a part of the gaming experience. Meanwhile, as the game operator, we don't want the inequality to be too extreme between the top players and the casual players so that no hopes for the newcomers to advance their ranking, which hurts their gaming experience and they would quit for other games. But is it a wise idea to brute-forcibly transfer the 'wealth' of the most hardcore, talented, or just luckiest players to the others to make the game more enjoyable for the bottom players?

If we were thinking about it in a way that "you're not one of the players, but the designer of the game," and you want the game to be sustainable and reputable, I believe the answer would not just that simple.

I'm not sure that makes for a good analogy.

That is a game, I enjoy flaunting wealth over people and using my ungodly strong power I've worked hard for to stomp on people in a game.

But I don't want to live on a monopoly board, or squash people into oblivion in real life. Games are quite often about direct competition.

While there is some argument for making sure not to kill the motivation of hard workers due to equalising society too far, I don't think the US is close to that level, and the scale is far, far in the other direction.

Also, forcibly taking isn't correct, it's a progressive tax on income not a raid.

I don't think this analogy works for a meaningful conversation.

My point is not about how an individual player gets their enjoyment from the game. Some players would want to beat every other to the death, even in the real world.

My point is individual player tends to complain how the game sucks from his standpoint without second-thought about the consequences to others, to the system, or even to themselves in the long run. I am more concerned about the non-leaner responses from changing the incentive structure. For instance, what would it turn out if, let's say, a gaming event where 90% of your income (EXP, game money, skill points, etc.) would be redistributed to others in the period of that event? Would anyone get excited about it? or people would say, "we gonna work on other things and wait for the freeriding," which is the most rational, economical decision for personal resource management. I would expect that every player of the game would spend more time with their family and we see drastically decreased MAU of the game as a result.

Ah yes, I misunderstood your point.

Perhaps because I tend to think of policy in terms of overall implication rather than from my own standpoint.

It actually does, but for reasons not immediately obvious.

The type of thinking the parent poster spoke of, where you are "not the player, but the operator" is a fundamentally different type of thinking. It's much closer in fact to the desired mindset of an actual statesman.

Your goal isn't (or shouldn't) be to maximize the fortune you (as the operator) or you as the player after having made your changes as an operator reap, but to put in place a fair and equitable mechanism through which the collective needs of the populace (even when the populace is at odds with itself through stalemate or least harmful actiom) are served in a sustainable and resource efficient manner.

“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes” (New York Judge Learned Hand).

If people abuse tax exemptions and deductions, it makes sense to ask why those exemptions and deductions exist. But it doesn’t make sense to me to demonize the taxpayers. Especially since I doubt many celebrities (Bloomberg’s target) actually make any of these tax decisions on their own. They hire accountants to worry about that while the celebrities show their concern and political bona fides in public.

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