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Comment by Staple_Diet | Hacker News Reader

There's a marked difference between an individual's right to privacy and that of a business. Shell companies are financial instruments designed to obfuscate ownership, usually for tax evasion purposes. Therefore increased transparency is, for the most part, in the public's interest.

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Why is it in the public interest to know who owns a company? Sure for specific groups of people, transparency is in order (elected politicians etc.) but wouldn’t financial disclosure laws work better? Why isn’t it the general public’s prerogative to know that I own 5% of a shell company (LLC) set up specially for the purpose of pooling an investment in a new venture?

shell companies are just companies, suppose the vast majority of which are formed for perfectly normal reasons,

"Corporations are people too, my friend."

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.

It's in the public interest only because of the particular way that taxes work.

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.

> If sleeping with someone was a taxable event, would that mean that it's OK to spy on people's bedrooms?

It would be immoral to make sleeping with someone a taxable event. And therefore immoral to treat it as a taxable event.

The founding fathers published anonymously to obfuscate ownership of their penmanship.

Would it be in the public interest that their identities were revealed and the lot be killed by the King ?

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