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What did the Irish government do to entitle itself to a chunk of the appreciation of your equity portfolio of presumably non-Irish companies? What did they do t

What did the Irish government do to entitle itself to a chunk of the appreciation of your equity portfolio of presumably non-Irish companies? What did they do to contribute to that equity growth?

dandellion 1y ago
I mean, other than give access the infrastructure, the people and the rule of law... what did the romans ever do for us?
_petronius 1y ago
If you lived in Ireland in that period, you benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads, bought things in shops, so and on so forth. Regardless, the idea that the government can only tax you if it directly gave you sufficient benefit, _in your assessment_, is of course nonsense. Taxes are what you owe to the society you live in, not about what society owes to you. If you are lucky enough to be internationally mobile, this does not exempt you from contributing to the communities you spend time in as you travel around the world. You cannot expect to arrive in a country, earn money from it, and depart again without paying your fair share of taxes. If you do not like how a country has structured its tax law and what priorities it has as a society, you are of course always free to not move there in the first place.
- robocat 1y ago
  > benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax). If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so they should get more government services??? The wealthy surely don't get better policing: instead the wealthy pay heaps for their own insurance and security systems. Be careful making any argument based on services received for money spent because the well off pay a lot and don't receive a lot for it.
  - Wobbles42 1y ago
    Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend. Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majority of people at least recognize the basic concept of ownership, and where protection from external state actors is provided. More to the point, they live in a system where most people see negative expected return from just killing them and taking their stuff Abstractions like insurance further require a system where agreements can be made and mostly enforced, and where the need for the insurance is low enough for the premium to be workable. The small security team at any given company is there to handle the the exceptions that don't conform to the larger society's rules. It doesn't replace that protection entirely. You'd need a standing army for that, and you'd have to work full time just to maintain its loyalty. Even with no direct services whatsoever, people benefit from society in more or less direct proportion to their wealth -- and arguably the benefit accrues exponentially as wealth increases, given that this enables the exponential growth of capital.
    - robocat 1y ago
      > Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income. My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less. There's a balance to incentives. I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.
      - psd1 1y ago
derriz 1y ago
I don’t understand the question. Governments collect tax in lots of different ways: income taxes, sales/consumption taxes, import taxes, capital gain taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc, What’s so special about capital gains taxes that requires the government to have had some sort of active involvement to be justified?
- spwa4 1y ago
  Capital gains are theoretical. You do not have that as money, but the state does want it as money. They are not what someone paid for your assets, they are what someone THINKS someone else might pay. Most smaller companies cannot be sold easily, and of course, the government is unwilling to take that as the valuation being zero (because what someone is willing to pay right now is in fact zero). And the government is unwilling to take any risk (they take cash only). So they're taxing money you do not have available to spend, and may not have at all. Think of it as taking a $10k diamond with you. It's worth something, but ... maybe next year artificial diamonds double the size of your diamond start costing $500, and your diamond's value goes to $550. The difficulty is that the government demands "10%", which is $1000 in taxes on the "value" of your diamond now. So for a big range of company sizes it's effectively a tax on nonexistent assets. This would not be the case for a huge (let's say revenue of 500k or more) company. But the government chooses not to tax those big companies.
  - Wobbles42 1y ago
    Perhaps the simple solution is to give those small business owners the option of selling their business to the government at whatever price the government feels it is worth. Any claim of valuation is really only meaningful as a purchase offer.
    - spwa4 1y ago
      So you want to implement taxation by having the government offer money to people? I understand the sentiment "money where your mouth is", but ... seems unlikely to be very useful to keep government spending up.

What did the Irish government do to entitle itself to a chunk of the appreciation of your equity portfolio of presumably non-Irish companies? What did they do to contribute to that equity growth?

dandellion 1y ago

I mean, other than give access the infrastructure, the people and the rule of law... what did the romans ever do for us?

_petronius 1y ago

If you lived in Ireland in that period, you benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads, bought things in shops, so and on so forth. Regardless, the idea that the government can only tax you if it directly gave you sufficient benefit, _in your assessment_, is of course nonsense. Taxes are what you owe to the society you live in, not about what society owes to you. If you are lucky enough to be internationally mobile, this does not exempt you from contributing to the communities you spend time in as you travel around the world. You cannot expect to arrive in a country, earn money from it, and depart again without paying your fair share of taxes. If you do not like how a country has structured its tax law and what priorities it has as a society, you are of course always free to not move there in the first place.

robocat 1y ago
> benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax). If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so they should get more government services??? The wealthy surely don't get better policing: instead the wealthy pay heaps for their own insurance and security systems. Be careful making any argument based on services received for money spent because the well off pay a lot and don't receive a lot for it.
- Wobbles42 1y ago
  Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend. Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majority of people at least recognize the basic concept of ownership, and where protection from external state actors is provided. More to the point, they live in a system where most people see negative expected return from just killing them and taking their stuff Abstractions like insurance further require a system where agreements can be made and mostly enforced, and where the need for the insurance is low enough for the premium to be workable. The small security team at any given company is there to handle the the exceptions that don't conform to the larger society's rules. It doesn't replace that protection entirely. You'd need a standing army for that, and you'd have to work full time just to maintain its loyalty. Even with no direct services whatsoever, people benefit from society in more or less direct proportion to their wealth -- and arguably the benefit accrues exponentially as wealth increases, given that this enables the exponential growth of capital.
  - robocat 1y ago
    > Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income. My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less. There's a balance to incentives. I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.
    - psd1 1y ago

derriz 1y ago

I don’t understand the question. Governments collect tax in lots of different ways: income taxes, sales/consumption taxes, import taxes, capital gain taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc, What’s so special about capital gains taxes that requires the government to have had some sort of active involvement to be justified?

spwa4 1y ago
Capital gains are theoretical. You do not have that as money, but the state does want it as money. They are not what someone paid for your assets, they are what someone THINKS someone else might pay. Most smaller companies cannot be sold easily, and of course, the government is unwilling to take that as the valuation being zero (because what someone is willing to pay right now is in fact zero). And the government is unwilling to take any risk (they take cash only). So they're taxing money you do not have available to spend, and may not have at all. Think of it as taking a $10k diamond with you. It's worth something, but ... maybe next year artificial diamonds double the size of your diamond start costing $500, and your diamond's value goes to $550. The difficulty is that the government demands "10%", which is $1000 in taxes on the "value" of your diamond now. So for a big range of company sizes it's effectively a tax on nonexistent assets. This would not be the case for a huge (let's say revenue of 500k or more) company. But the government chooses not to tax those big companies.
- Wobbles42 1y ago
  Perhaps the simple solution is to give those small business owners the option of selling their business to the government at whatever price the government feels it is worth. Any claim of valuation is really only meaningful as a purchase offer.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    So you want to implement taxation by having the government offer money to people? I understand the sentiment "money where your mouth is", but ... seems unlikely to be very useful to keep government spending up.