>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status, as is the case with the Panama Papers. Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations.
This is a scary thing that has been building over the last 10 years. Wealthy people are vilified for being wealthy even when they play by the rules. You saw this a lot with Occupy Wall Street and you hear similar rhetoric from Bernie Sanders supporters condemning the "donor class" and being angry at banks for being big regardless of anything else. But these people do exactly the same thing you and I do. I take advantage of the tax system when I deduct education expenses. I lobby the government when I contribute to the EFF. I want the companies I invest in to be as big and as profitable as possible. If I had more money, those things would simply be in higher quantities. That is the only thing most of these people are guilty of, doing the same thing we all do but at a much higher magnitude. We can recognize that magnitude difference is a problem and want to shrink it without resorting to vilifying people who simply play the hand they are dealt.
IMO there exists behavior I'll call "bad faith tax reduction". You might not be doing anything illegal by the letter of the law, but maybe those education expenses you deducted, went to a business you own (or something like that).
An exploitable tax code is like an exploitable software package. Yes, the software gave you everyone's personal information in the database. But maybe it only did that when you ran a buffer overflow attack to escalate your permissions.
Setting aside exact numbers, I figure a decent razor for whether you're being honest is whether you mind other people learning about what your tax return looks like. I deducted my property tax and my mortgage interest; I will tell you that freely. But if I had twelve offshore shell companies scooting money around through various tax loopholes, even though it's not illegal I probably wouldn't want anyone but the IRS to know...
The analogy I use is how people go shopping in a neighboring state for lower sales taxes, or buy a house in an inconvenient place for lower property taxes.
Wealthier people are doing the same thing.
People get angry more so because they don't get the privilege to participate in those advantages. While simultaneously taking advantage of what they can.
As you can see... people in middle class and lower play by the rules almost perfectly. Now the richest don't play anymore. There are those that play by the rules, but a lot of those that don't.
Finland has a progressive income tax.
So let's stop the bullshit that everything does it. This picture shows it clearly that only the richest are the assholes (in meaningful way).
The difference is that at one end of the spectrum people are taking advantages so that they can eat tonight, and the other end is taking advantages so that they can have a few million dollars more this quarter than last.
They lobby the government on their own behalf. You know who else does that? Everyone. That is how democracy works. No one blames a middle class person for supporting a candidate who plans to cut taxes on the middle class. Why do we blame the upper class for doing the same?
Like I said, you can have a problem with the magnitude of influence they have and I think we should move to reduce that magnitude. But you are being biased if you simply have a problem with the fact they do have influence.
Not that they have some influence. That they have all the influence. What you and I want has zero effect on congress. What the rich want, they get. So how you claim democracy works is demonstrably not how it works in the USA.
I think I agree with you, but this rings false. The main (only?) way to effectively lobby the government is with money -- which gives the wealthy far more leverage. If one side is saying, "Choose policy A please," and the other side is saying, "Choose policy B, there's $30,000 in donations in it for you," I bet policy B gets a better look in. It turns into a vicious cycle when Policy B also happens to help that wealthy person hang onto more of their money.
I dislike it, but damn if I can't figure out an alternative.
I agree with the sentiment of your comment. But I also think some people crossed the line even though legal and playing by the rules.
For example, when law makers do things that would be considered to be a conflict of interest or due to them having insider info on what laws are coming to effect.
Or when people like Marianna Olszewski hiring a stranger to conceal her ownership of offshore accounts.
Somewhere there's a line crossed that isn't just reducing the tax a person has to pay. It went from tax reduction as an incentive to do something to being malicious.
When you deduct education expenses to reduce your tax, it's a reduction meant to encourage you to do something.
it really isn't scary. what difference does it make if they "play by the rules"? it isn't a game. the criticism is that the rules are damaging to many and beneficial to few. what's so scary about that? even if you think occupy wall street's and bernie sanders's criticism of the rich is off base, what about it is "really scary"?
I'm having trouble figuring out which part of this is sarcasm, but I can't imagine anyone but a child could boil this whole thing down into "Someone is rich, I want their money."
The difference between sharing information about ordinary people charged with crimes and about the rich and powerful, is that the rich and powerful people are rich and powerful. These are people who exert power over the rest of society and therefore their business dealings - especially shady, quasi-legal or outright illegal business dealings - are in the public interest.
The fact some random person has been charged with a DUI is not comparable with the fact the Icelandic prime minister engaged in questionable business practices and possibly a conflict of interest, especially from the perspective of Iceland's citizens.
So privacy protection isn't an absolute right, more of a relative / subjective one and the deciding authority on the subject should be the internet at large. Weird to hear that kind of thinking on hacker news...
Slowly but surely, I'm coming to the position that "hacking and leaking" is never "wrong". It's a form of speech, and I'm a free speech absolutist. Let's stipulate that some things are illegal and not "wrong", just as others are legal and "wrong".
It's not clear to me, however, that this case actually is a hack, in the sense that whoever released this material might have had legitimate access to it as a part of doing business. In that case this is certainly an unethical failure to uphold terms of contract. Who's going to enforce that contract, however? Certainly not IRS or any other USA agency.
[EDIT:] In case it's not clear, I don't think that society in general is ethically limited by any "poison tree" doctrine in situations like this. Once this information is public, however it came to be so, we are free to use it as we see fit.
> Slowly but surely, I'm coming to the position that "hacking and leaking" is never "wrong". It's a form of speech, and I'm a free speech absolutist.
Wow, a "free speech absolutist". How absolute? So if I am a voyeur, poke a camera through your window and put it on the Internet that's OK per my free speech rights? I break into your bank's website and leak all the usernames and passwords -- I can be prosecuted for the break in but not be responsible for the consequences of leaking the login credentials? It's OK for me to publish a front page article claiming you're a convicted rapist, even if that's not true?
"Poking a camera through your window" is "hacking" now? Wow!
Sure, I would prefer that you not do that, or indeed that you not physically trespass in any way. A more interesting hypothetical would be for thousands of homeowners to install a bunch of IP cameras in their homes, and for you to hack those without the benefit of physical trespass. I don't think you'd have much of a leg to stand on if you were to publish John and Jane Doe's humdrum bedroom activities. However, you might also witness some truly awful shit, which I'd have no problem with your bringing to the attention of society.
The bank example is another aspect of our bending all rational rules and expectations in the banks' "favor". They shouldn't build such brittle systems, and the more we coddle them the worse they get. It would be possible to prosecute fraud without criminalizing security research.
Libel laws are most often used for the benefit of the already powerful, so yeah getting rid of those would be an improvement.
>Slowly but surely, I'm coming to the position that "hacking and leaking" is never "wrong". It's a form of speech, and I'm a free speech absolutist.
What about the celebrity iCloud hack? That seems like a cut and dry case of "wrong" and should prevent most of us from using words like "never" and "absolutist". Once that is established, it becomes a question of where that line falls.
Yeah that's a challenging case. ISTM that norms with respect to body image are changing (consider, for instance, the more nuanced responses of the Kardashians to similar situations), but they haven't changed completely yet. Therefore it's wrong that the nude image of a woman is treated differently than the nude image of a man. It's perhaps more wrong that the nude images of celebrities are treated differently by prosecutors than those of humbler folk, but that's a different discussion.
N.B.: Humans often use words in rhetorical rather than literal fashion.
Of course not. Police are employed by society. Unfettered police will destroy society. We would never choose to fund our own destruction, so police have to follow rules.
Are there really educated adults who think that we should accept any behavior whatsoever from our police?
Because we live in a civil society, if the police can't break into your house and take what evidence they want, and they won't accept evidence from anyone else who broken into you house what exactly does this serve?
If the only thing that is ok here is to leak stuff to the media stuff that usually cannot be collaborated, and often might actually be intentionally if not completely fabricated than at least edited to some extent you are advocating for mob rule and trial by public opinion.
If you believe "hacking and leaking is never wrong" because they're forms of speech, except when the state does it, you're not really a free speech absolutist.
Close, but it's more like the threshold for "wrong" is much higher than most people care to admit. The methods that many very wealthy people use to reduce their tax burden should be common knowledge in society as a whole, not merely among the very wealthy. In that way, such knowledge will inform robust and honest debate about taxes in general. So much political discourse is piloted by well-compensated media gatekeepers, for the benefit of those who compensate them rather than for the general public. We should cherish those rare instances in which the curtain is pulled aside so we may see how things really work. The schoolboy legalism seen in TFA amounts to obscurantist sophistry, based on nothing more profound than simple analogy.
BTW, thanks for a reasonable and incisive response.
Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations.
I've looked into offshore banking and shell companies and the like a bit over the years. I'm not sure why; I guess I just have a fascination with business and finance. My conclusion has long been that, for an individual who intends to comply with the law, there is very little benefit to these structures. Generally, an individual can't legally lower their tax burden through the mechanism of an offshore shell company.
The legal versions of this involve genuine corporations headquartering in a business friendly location. They don't do it secretly, however. It is done in the open, and the corporation's owners (the shareholders) still have to pay their taxes on any dividends or capital gains in whatever jurisdiction they live in. You can argue whether or not Google should be legally allowed to move most of their income to Ireland, but that is a totally different scenario to a single person starting a company in Panama to hold his investments. In the United States, at least, a single shareholder company that does nothing other than hold investments is treated as a pass through for income tax purposes. I.e. you can't avoid taxes simply by keeping the money in the company. Moreover, even if you could avoid the tax on the company profits, you would still have to pay tax when your wanted to take the money out to actually spend it.
You are correct that a legitimate corporation will not be taxed on the money unless and until it is repatriated, but that doesn't help an (honest) individual; it only helps multinational corporations.
For every country (3) where I have filed taxes, you are liable for individual taxes as soon as you earn the income. So, in the case of a legitimate business, as soon as you pay yourself a salary or other benefit (perhaps, buy yourself a yacht; really, anything that is not a clear business expense). It doesn't matter where in the world you earn the income or spend it; you are taxed on your worldwide income.
However, to take it a step further, the IRS doesn't really recognize personal holding companies as legitimate businesses for tax purposes. You are liable to pay tax on any investment income as though it were personal income even if you leave it in the company name. Again, it doesn't matter where in the world the holding company is.
An article by Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center - "the most important think tank you've never heard of." [1]
If you're interested in the background of this interesting organization, there's some funding information at [2].
It's maybe not that surprising that a board member of an economics outreach effort heavily funded by Koch Industries would argue for the freedom of the very rich to "to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations," especially considering that the Kochs were exposed doing just this by a previous round of ICIJ published leaks. [3]
But maybe it's worth asking why such a reasonable practice, totally within the law, would be so secret in the first place that it takes leaks like these to make it known.
How many of us would approve of that behavior? Keep in mind the hacker is spreading the information not only to prosecutors but to the entire world, and outside of any process sanctioned by the rule of law.
The Panama Papers didn't get uploaded to the internet, it was distributed to journalists. The person who leaked the information was deferring to the judgement of journalists to publish information in a responsible way. It's entirely possible that there is material in the Panama Papers that is exactly what he describes, but we haven't seen it because it's not being published.
The journalists have come up with some criteria about what's responsible here. It might be not be the right criteria, but it does exist.
The writer assumes that the laws work and asks "Is it ethic leak this illegal activities?". And he says that in this condition, proper way would be the legal ways. No! The laws and legal ways do not work always, in such cases people themselves will be the law and the prosecuters. It is like asking to catch all ISIS members without killing them, that would be the proper law! Not bombarding them! Don't kill ISIS, catch them and prosecute them, oh yeah what lawfull legal world! Would you expect justige from corrupt countries and corrupt procecuters? Revealing these corruptins is proper act and I support these hackers.
I think the flaw in the analogy is that we as a society have had the chance to openly debate things like attorney-client privilege. We understand that we have a legal system in which guilty people may enjoy protection, and we understand the reasons for it. At the very least, the fact of the matter is public knowledge. That's not the case for kinds of tax-avoidance and general shadiness being revealed in the Panama Papers.
I didn't stipulate how to disclose it, only that the right thing is to disclose it. I doubt you'd suggest the person should live in denial and/or not fight for his rights in some manner. Disclosing things doesn't necessarily include stupidly getting oneself killed by revealing them in a poor manner, i.e. inappropriately or unskillfully. After all, that would hardly do a good job of revealing the fact it's his right to have his own sexual preference, wouldn't you say? The important question is how to do things, not what to do. Given this, would you agree now?
The poster you are responding to is making a utilitarian moral argument. You are referencing a novel that explores the a common source of crime (poverty) and the chain of events that follows.
This is one of the least appropriate use of Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
The article starts with 'yes' and waters it down to 'maybe' and a real discussion could be had about whether or not the ends justifies the means, especially when it comes to criminal acts revealing dubious but legal acts.
No, it is entirely appropriate to invoke Betteridge to illustrate how TFA is contradicted by its own headline. This is a common use of Betteridge, and is indeed the only interesting way to use it.
Betteridge's law is totally appropriate : His point was that people heading an article with a question intend to defend a position while not immediately associating with it.
This is a scary thing that has been building over the last 10 years. Wealthy people are vilified for being wealthy even when they play by the rules. You saw this a lot with Occupy Wall Street and you hear similar rhetoric from Bernie Sanders supporters condemning the "donor class" and being angry at banks for being big regardless of anything else. But these people do exactly the same thing you and I do. I take advantage of the tax system when I deduct education expenses. I lobby the government when I contribute to the EFF. I want the companies I invest in to be as big and as profitable as possible. If I had more money, those things would simply be in higher quantities. That is the only thing most of these people are guilty of, doing the same thing we all do but at a much higher magnitude. We can recognize that magnitude difference is a problem and want to shrink it without resorting to vilifying people who simply play the hand they are dealt.