[dmurray]

Does a search warrant for your house give the police the right to search your car, if they found your car keys in your house? What about your neighbour's or your employer's car - perhaps on the other side of the world - if you happened to have those keys? To compel you not to tell your employer to change the locks, so the seized keys won't work?

These seem like closer real-world analogies for what exactly a warrant to search someone's computer should entitle the police to do.

[pjerem]

Your analogy doesn’t work. Your neighbor is not you.

$COMPANY is $COMPANY all around the world and if $COMPANY wants to do business in $COUNTRY (which is not an obligation, they choose to), then yes, they have to entirely cooperate with $COUNTRY.

If they don’t want to, they can still do business elsewhere.

[AnthonyMouse]

> $COMPANY is $COMPANY all around the world

This is the thing which is not the case. The subsidiary in the US is nearly always a different company than the one(s) in Europe. They'll have different management and different lawyers etc. Sometimes they even have different owners, e.g. because one of them is a joint venture with some other company, or a franchise. And they have to be different, because different countries have different laws and those laws often conflict with each other. So the subsidiary in the US follows US law and the one in France follows the law in France.

You could try to make it otherwise, but it's pretty obvious what would happen then. Companies couldn't formally operate in multiple countries because their laws are incompatible, so instead there would be a straw front company in any given country that nominally isn't owned by the conglomerate, but is effectively just reselling their product/service in that country for an additional margin that only pays the salary of local management. To prevent this you would have to ban companies from having foreign suppliers, which is not very practical.

And since countries know that's what would happen, they allow foreign subsidiaries to be regarded as separate entities even if they have shared ownership, instead of demanding the charade.

[pjerem]

In absolute, I agree with you. But personally if I had to chose between tax evasion (permitted by those schemes) and having less multinational companies because it’d be more difficult… well, my country was doing pretty okay before multinationals and is not doing okay since every taxes are evaded.

Well Netflix is nice and all but I prefer social security and teachers in school.

[AnthonyMouse]

Federal revenue as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Basically flat since the end of WWII, significantly lower before the war. At the height of the New Deal, less than half of what it is now. And that's in the face of significant growth in real GDP per capita. Probably not a dissimilar story in most other Western countries.

The problem isn't in the amount of taxes being collected, it's in where the money is going.

[Dylan16807]

I don't think a warrant to search an office should let them use the keys they find there on a company truck five miles away, either. Despite being the same company. (If it's in the parking lot then it's a maybe.)