Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

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I'd love to actively prevent people from moving to these places because it'll continue offshoring domestic wealth into tax havens.

Honestly, this is the huge problem of our time - globalization has happened and the concepts of tax laws and taxation of value production haven't properly adapted. The US should be taxing all the value legitimately made in the US - if a designer in the US makes something that is then mass produced in China the value taxes currently only comprehend the physical good value, not the intellectual value of the good - for things like fashionable clothing nearly all of the value is created domestically and the actual material value is inconsequential.

Over time the ability to dodge taxes in this manner has placed unfair downward pressure on countries to lower taxes in an effort to attract the revenue that can be freely moved around and hence we've got spiraling wealth inequality due to insufficient taxation.

People opting out of taxation while reaping the benefit of educated populations (or their personal education) along with security and the laundry list of the benefits of society is simply ethically unacceptable.

There is no shortage of tax havens. Anyone who wants one will just move to the Bahamas. They already do, as you point out. Charter cities are thus totally orthogonal to this (despite the article's misleading implications).

The point is to improve life for the 99% of the world who can't just move to a tax haven, by building prosperous cities they can move to. This is not just a theory - China lifted 500,000,000 out of poverty using Special Economic Zones to transform their economy over decades. Many countries aspire to the same advance in prosperity for their people.

As much as I like embracing the statement "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" I think we really need to solve tax havens before we can make more places that can serve as them.

Solve them internally in your own country instead of the near-impossible task of trying to bend the whole world to accommodate your interests.

Actually, I emigrated - I now live in a country with more rigid tax laws and left the US behind. This is somewhat of a salve, but we live in a post-globalization world, cleaning up your backyard doesn't mean anything if your neighbor's sewage is leaking under the fence.

Huge tax loopholes being accepted by central world players like the US puts pressure on smaller countries to accept them as well.

The simple solution to me is that a country offers good value for the taxes people pay to it.

Then people and their taxable assets will gladly stay.

This - although easier said than done in a liberal democracy.

The problem is once you have the kind of money where tax havens become a priority, you no longer need anything the government might be able to provide. And then the game just becomes collecting as much money as you can and preventing that money from flowing through the economy by shuttling it out of the country.

The “good value” should hopefully be a well functioning nation full of healthy and happy people. Unfortunately that’s not the goal of most people with that kind of money.

> "nearly all of the value is created domestically and the actual material value is inconsequential."

Only because the laborers are being horrendously underpaid, no? If globalization had really fully happened you wouldn't be able to pay people in china slave labor wages to make your clothes for you.

In the US that labor is so extremely unvalued that it's almost always automated - other countries have such intensely undervalued labour that it can actually compete with automation.

And yea, I think we do have some twisted and perverse version of globalization - rather than bringing the world up we seem to be perpetually exploiting the third world... eventually that might piss of the third world enough that they do something about that but it hasn't happened yet.

This is happening one country at a time. It happened to South Korea and a lesser extent Japan. It’s happening in India and China.

We still have centuries of third world countries to exploit until they are fully developed.

This isn't true. As time goes on, places that were non-developed become more developed. China's already started to outsource its production because people there expect higher wages than they did 10 years ago.

It's a gradient from country to country. Overall, for individuals in absolute terms, things are getting better- although for certain subpopulations in relative terms (e.g. blue collar americans) they've gotten worse.

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