Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?(marginalrevolution.com) |
Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?(marginalrevolution.com) |
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.
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...
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.
Y-scale is the taxes paid
X-scale is the income
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).
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.
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.
Playing within the rules is irrelevant when you're the one who gets to write the rules.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mostly legal and nothing illegal are contradicting.
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.
1: http://web.archive.org/web/20070824203256/http://gazette.gmu...
2: http://www.desmogblog.com/mercatus-center
3: https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks/new-leak-revea...
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.
Was it wrong for rosa parks to hack the segregated bus system in montgomery?
Suppose you're a gay man living in Yemen. I do not accept any definition of "right" or morality that would compel me to disclose that information.
I don't see the connection. :-S
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.
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?
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.
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.
N.B.: Humans often use words in rhetorical rather than literal fashion.
Are there really educated adults who think that we should accept any behavior whatsoever from our police?
BTW, thanks for a reasonable and incisive response.
The state needs to make better rules, obviously passive taxation has pitiful compliance outcomes.
(spoiler alert - this utilitarian moral argument didn't work too well for Rodion)
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.
No raindrop feels responsible for the flood, but make it so people can't get out of the rain, and before long, everybody starts hating the rain.
Stand on against what? You seem to be arguing that it should be perfectly OK to do exactly that.
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.
And that's totally what this article does.
IMO, this is one of the few articles where I believe that a rhetorical question as a title is appropriate.
For example, if you wrote the tax law, you could say "let's tax everyone but me"
But if everyone writes the tax law together, nobody will let you exempt yourself, and you won't let them exempt themselves.
Like some kind of law-making standoff.