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Comment by infinite_spin | Hacker News Reader

> So they should take away other people's money because they can

Ireland isn't stealing from other people by changing their tax policies to attract business, that isn't theft by any stretch of the imagination outside of a libertarian one that posits all taxation is theft.. and you haven't answered my question: Why should Ireland change their tax policy to benefit other (much larger) governments?

It's fairly insulting that you've described the Irish as thieves, something Europeans have done for centuries, just because you want more tax revenue for other, much larger, governments.

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The reasoning that Ireland's tax policy is theft is not discussed here from a "taxation is theft" perspective, but from a "we should tax the rich" perspective. Because Ireland is in the EU, this effectively halves taxes on most big international companies in the EU (less than half of what it is for everybody else/normal companies in the EU), and makes it 12.5% for a few specific FANG companies.

Which is deeply unfair, from two main perspectives:

1) everyone should be taxed the same. Big, small, local, global, ... it should not matter (if anything global should be taxed more than local)

2) it only works because everyone's tax revenues go down a lot, which means yet again the rich escape taxes

3) it makes something like EU corporate tax initiative, which is horrible (it involves an extremely complicated way of attributing specific transactions to specific locations and then taxing them locally. However, like the EU VAT initiative it's main problem is how complicated it is)

> we should tax the rich

> everyone should be taxed the same

Ireland, as a sovereign nation, gets to decide their own tax policy.

None of this is theft, you're just maligning Ireland for their choice of tax policy, something they're entirely within their rights to decide without external influence.

I think we're at an impasse.

> None of this is theft, you're just maligning Ireland for their choice of tax policy, something they're entirely within their rights to decide without external influence.

I think there are some serious caveats here, such as Ireland signing both the OECD minimum tax treaty, then doing this anyway. I feel like that's at the very least dishonest.

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