| This kind of thing (on a smaller scale, admittedly) is what I do in my day job. In the same way we hear "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" we can say "Money interprets taxation as damage and routes around it." Someone imposing censorship upon the internet might have all of the morality and justification in the world behind his/her argument. Irrelevant. So too with taxation. You can talk about moral imperatives all you want -- one should support the country you're in by paying taxes. Irrelevant. You make tangible objects float in mid-air by altering the law of gravity, or by using magnificent quantities of effort (e.g., fly tons of metal through the sky by burning vast quantities of fuel). You (as a government) make money change course and come to rest elsewhere by altering the law of taxation or by using magnificent quantities of rhetoric (look for "should" and "ought" and "them" in sentences). Or you use magnificent quantities of enforcement (tax audits, put people in jail, etc. I live in this universe, too.) Ultimately, the point by @yummyfajitas is correct. Countries have sovereignty and can do as they damn well please. The U.S. has the bullying power of the U.S. dollar and a lot of guns to convince other countries to behave in ways that the U.S. wants them to behave. This will work until it doesn't work anymore. The way this will cease working for the U.S. government is that the bullying will become unacceptable for other governments. They will rightly see this as ceding national sovereignty to the U.S. government. This will not happen until the U.S. dollar weakens and a plausible reserve currency appears. China's slow moves to relaxing currency controls tells you where the next likely reserve currency will be. The other way this will cease working is visible in the cited article. Large economic organizations -- like Apple -- are starting to develop their own anti-gravitation fields and can float above tax laws of any particular country. It's fun to watch. Put your moral imperatives in your pocket for a while and just observe. What is Congress doing, and why? Why, for instance, is a lot of the anti-international tax legislation in Congress coming from Senator Levin (D-Mich)? What are companies doing? After you see something happen, don't ask "Why?" Better to ask, "And then what will happen?" You might surprise yourself. The unintended consequences are sitting there, in plain sight. |