> Edit: If you disagree, are you saying that shaming them into not doing this solely on some moral compass is the right fix? Does that scale?
Legislation doesn't do anything if actors don't see a moral responsibility to abide by it. Case in point: There are laws against murder but murder still happens.
Does that mean we need better laws in regards to murder?
Imho it rather means that some parts of society still have a "moral debt" in recognizing the value of human life.
Same pretty much applies to paying taxes. For some people it's something they do out of a sense of responsibility to the society they live in, to others it's an unfair burden they need to evade at all costs.
And because the latter behavior isn't even that criminalized, there are large sectors of society where nobody feels a moral responsibility to pay taxes. Heck in many of these circles people actually boast about how much taxes they evaded/how much money they got out of the government. In that regard, there might be quite a cultural angle to this whole issue.
That analogy is hard for me to follow. Again, for the most part, no laws are being broken.
One that's probably more relatable is itemized deductions for US taxpayers. I can deduct the property taxes and mortgage interest for my house from my Federal income tax. Do people take advantage of that and deduct the costs for ridiculous mansions? Sure. Shaming them for it is silly. If that exemption isn't fair, then put a cap on it.
> That analogy is hard for me to follow. Again, for the most part, no laws are being broken.
The analogy was more to demonstrate that harsher regulation ain't always the only solution. And with something as abstract as "taxation" I think it's usually a rather bad approach because new regulations will only result in new loopholes being created, it's an endless cat&mouse game wasting a lot of resources for everybody involved.
That's why I mentioned that "moral debt". Across the whole world there exists lots of behavior that's technically not "illegal", but still frowned upon by large parts of societies, tax evasion rates among them.
Imho if you want people to follow the "rules of society", and not use every chance they get to circumvent financial legislation (which is what a lot of tax evasion effectively boils down to), then you first need to convince them that paying taxes isn't just a burden to them but also of use to them.
> I can deduct the property taxes and mortgage interest for my house from my Federal income tax.
If that's an easy and obvious process, open and evident to everybody who'd it be relevant to, then that's a-okay.
Sadly that often ain't the case which is in large parts the result of the above-mentioned cat&mouse game.
I realize that my whole point might come across naive in a kinda "if people were just good we wouldn't need laws" way, but that's not at all my intention. I just think there's a real cultural rift here in terms of how seriously some people take their responsibilities towards the society they are living in, historically that's never been something you could fix through "legislation".
Ahh, that helps me understand better. Hard to be completely clear in a global context though.
Nike, for example, has a company in a tax haven that owns the intellectual IP for "the swoosh". It receives payments from other Nike companies for the "right to use".
That loophole has to exist, as any company, in any country, could be an IP holder.
> That loophole has to exist, as any company, in any country, could be an IP holder.
Exactly, that's why it's probably more useful to appeal to conscience then trying to enforce compliance through regulation.
In the case of multinational corporations that might be a lost cause, but these corporations are also just made up of real people, so there's still a very slim chance.
The other alternative would be a straightforward global taxation system, eliminating a lot of the "multinational" loopholes.
But that sounds awfully a lot like a "World Government" and people who don't like paying taxes usually ain't exactly keen on NWO sounding ideas either.
Legislation doesn't do anything if actors don't see a moral responsibility to abide by it. Case in point: There are laws against murder but murder still happens.
Does that mean we need better laws in regards to murder? Imho it rather means that some parts of society still have a "moral debt" in recognizing the value of human life.
Same pretty much applies to paying taxes. For some people it's something they do out of a sense of responsibility to the society they live in, to others it's an unfair burden they need to evade at all costs.
And because the latter behavior isn't even that criminalized, there are large sectors of society where nobody feels a moral responsibility to pay taxes. Heck in many of these circles people actually boast about how much taxes they evaded/how much money they got out of the government. In that regard, there might be quite a cultural angle to this whole issue.