[josejuanisaac]

“They are doing it too” is legally a valid excuse. The way legal disputes get settled usually is based on the outcome of precedent legal cases and how they relate to the current case. Your moral outrage (and the outrage caused by paradise papers type reports) is just a failure to see the world for what it is. An ant can complain all day about the size of the mammoth, complain that it’s unfair that it’s got a fur coat or that it’s one step is equivalent to hundreds of ant steps, but this won’t change reality. This is how success works: if you do it for so long and in such a way comparable to Apple, you are able to have more leg room than other ants. My only criticism of Apple is that do portray themselves as very humble engineers that love designing beautiful products. Engineers who have any experience designing software and hardware products have a deep admiration for Apple as an organization, specifically because we know exactly how much work goes into a working product, moreso because Apple’s products, even though they are not perfect, show a high level of resiliency both in the market and in our day to day lives.

Admitting thus that at least some of the people and companies that hide their money in tax havens made their money in a legitimite way (we’ll get into this later), don’t you think they are entitled to try to save as much of it as they can? The author of the piece makes reference to the mostly public educational system which implies Apple has some social reaponsibility to give back to it’s country. How about the high salaries that Apple pays to its engineers? Isn’t this enough to show that they value craftmanship?

[lovich]

Oh well, guess we should stop all attempts at improving society guys. Apple can do it, so they should do it, and we should stop discussing the matter.

Like goddammit man, the moral outrage is not there because people fail to see the world the way it is. It's there precisely _because_ people can see the way it is now and it's fucked up.

And paying it's engineers a high salary is enough of a payback to society? Did that cover the roads they ship their goods on? The international Navy that protects their supply lines from overseas factories? The education system which produced their engineers? All the other inputs they rely on and externalities they offload?

No it didn't, because once you get rich you get your own set of rules. Paying back what you owe is for the proles

[loceng]

There's no failure on my part to see how the world is. Legally speaking, law is to be interpreted. In these cases of tax evasion, it's fairly obvious they're breaking the spirit of the law. Your entitlement argument is bizarre to me. They are entitled to save as much as they can, after they've paid their dues back to the society who helped support a more stable environment. In Canada for example, many health care costs are covered for every citizen - so businesses don't have to necessarily pay as high of wages to workers - they of course are partially paying for these health costs through taxes. Same with public transit and road systems their employees will use. Apple paying high salaries is an apples and oranges argument - likewise, they couldn't "afford" as high of salaries if they were paying proper taxes; of course they still could afford such high salaries because of their profits. Imagine how good Apple would look right now if they were one of the few massive companies who didn't avoid paying fair taxes? Especially since they can afford it.

[lobster_johnson]

But that's not how legal systems works. If you're caught running a red light, you can't argue that "many other people are doing it, too". Similarly, if a dozen cars run a red light at the same time, and only you are stopped, the best you can do is argue discrimination; you still broke the law, and you're still culpable, and it's the police's prerogative to catch whomever they can.

That's also not how legal precedent works. Legal precedents in the US are derived from court decisions, not whether something is occurring en masse. I'm not even sure why precedents work, given that there's no "case" here.

Your misplaced cynicism about moral outrage becomes more obvious if you replace tax evasion with something much worse, e.g. child labour or human trafficking, something which is in fact prevalent, though probably not within Apple's sphere. But the moral outrage exists because these papers expose something so blatantly immoral that people are genuinely surprised and dismayed at the sheer scale at which rich companies and people are stockpiling money in secret. We know human trafficking occurs every day, all over the world; if someone uncovers a big network of, say, politicans involved in this trafficking, aren't we right to be outraged? Is it a "failure to see the world for what it is" just because it's accepted that evil things happen? How blasé can one get?

Re "don't you think they are entitled to try to save as much of it as they can?", this confuses morality with legality. As David Mitchell eloquently points out [1], the current systems are effectively a tax on conscience. Taxes are traditionally designed to incentivize good behaviour (e.g. tax breaks on saved pensions, because that benefits both you and society), but the system currently incentivizes bad behaviour among the select few who have the means and lack of scruples to do it, penalizing those who lack the means and are conscientious about their taxes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc8epam4NyY

[stult]

Other people are doing it too is NOT legally a valid excuse for anything.

Source: tax lawyer.

[jamesblonde]

Precedent legal cases is the common law system in the former commonwealth countries and the US. The Napoleanic system is in-place in Germany and much of Europe.