Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrissimo1976 | Hacker News Reader

patrissimo1976

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com