I find it ironic in an interesting way that on HN there is such a strong privacy bent generally, but on the topic of financial privacy it seems to be the reverse
And by removing the privacy of corporations you’re just removing the privacy of people within it.
To put it differently, they're not groups of people, they're a distinct legal "entity" that can then be fractionally owned by people while shielding them from whatever it's doing.
This gives it special powers, you can't arrest a corporation or send it to jail. It can act against the will of some of its fractional owners, it can own its own property, and it can legally participate in electoral politics, beyond how any or all of its owners are legally able to participate.
So by reducing the privacy an LLC provides, you are reducing the privacy of individuals.
No different than say banks keeping account owner information private.
shell companies are just companies, suppose the vast majority of which are formed for perfectly normal reasons,
If they can have "free speech" and are "legal persons" then the public _surely_ has an interest in knowing who is benefiting (the ultimate beneficial owner) from that corporation's actions.
If sleeping with someone was a taxable event, would that mean that it's OK to spy on people's bedrooms? After all, it's in the public interest.
In principle, I think that taxing only land ownership and pollution is the theoretically fair way to do taxation. And land ownership doesn't require obtaining any data that isn't necessarily known by the government in the first place.
It would be immoral to make sleeping with someone a taxable event. And therefore immoral to treat it as a taxable event.
Would it be in the public interest that their identities were revealed and the lot be killed by the King ?