1. Taking steps to minimize your taxes is neither ethical or unethical, it's just basic common sense. It's like choosing to buy the cheaper apple when you go to the store. The whole reason why we have sin taxes and tax breaks is because legislators believe that it influences behavior and so they create this byzantine tax code in order to try to manage behavior. I guess whether you believe contributing to your 401K or claiming the mortgage interest deduction is immoral depends on your ethical code. To me, this is a category error -- if you think financial management can either increase or decrease your morality then you have a very decadent (and broken) moral code.
One can argue that such a complex tax code is bad policy, because it results in such a complex system that you need teams of lawyers to really understand it and take advantage of it, meaning that for ordinary people it's not worth it and the economy as a whole wastes far too much on tax professionals. But that never seems to stop anyone from clamoring for tax breaks for their pet cause.
2. The whole point of globalism as an enterprise is to support (and encourage) cross border capital flows. It is a system intended to allow foreigners purchasing up capital in the home country and home citizens doing the same overseas. These cross border capital flows finance trade deficits (without them, there would be no trade deficits).
But different nations have very different tax codes so this encourages a race to the bottom. Much like outsourcing labor. This race to the bottom effect is not some secret that requires an expose, it is an intended feature of the system. Why I am shocked, shocked, that americans would invest their money in the jurisdiction that yields the greatest tax-adjusted return. Just shocked!
This is why many people (such as myself) are opposed to globalism, but we are painted as silly xenophobes who don't want to eat French Brie. Well, OK, you wanted globalism -- this is globalism. And the only alternative to globalism is nationalism. Now one can make a claim that globalism as a value system is unethical and that only nationalism (or even better localism -- let each region have its own currency and borders and trade policy -- is ethical), but an individual who is stuck in a legal code that encourages and subsidizes globalism is not acting ethically or unethically when he buys a cheap TV from china, a car from Japan or sends his money to the Bahamas, as he is stuck with the tab of globalism (low interest rates, de-industrialization, political unrest, decline of solidarity, undermining of democracy, global financial crises) so he may as well enjoy the benefits -- access to the benefits of low wages in China and to the benefits of low taxes in the Bahamas. If you think one is unethical, then what about the other? And if you are being paid wages or earning returns determined by competition from the world, why not take advantage of cheap products and cheap taxes overseas? You cannot create your own private economic system just because you think the current one is a disaster.
Bottom line, if you don't like this type of tax arbitrage, then put a stop to it by discouraging (taxing) cross border capital flows. It would also put a stop to outsourcing and cheap TVs as well, and you would be instantly painted as a nationalist trade-war fighting xenophobe, but this is how you solve the problem, not by appealing to people to "buy American" or "store their wealth" in America with some faux ethical argument. Appeals to personal virtue to pay more than is needed (whether for TVs or taxes) ring pretty hollow.
Does this argument explain why I can't think of a single country that has put forth a concerted effort to discourage cross border capital flows? I don't think so. If I'm wrong please point out a case study. I think the fact that globalism ends up being a net positive for nations long-term is the reason they prefer to stick to it as a system. I'm not well-versed in economics as a whole, but it seems like PPP is one of the metrics that can somewhat approximate how well individuals in a nation are able to exercise economic power. And it looks like globalism does help increase that if the goods your country produces are uniquely positioned in some way (ie uniquely cheap, uniquely durable etc.). I remember many people predicting that the luxury-good level pricing of the iPhone meant that it would never take off in "non-developed" countries but clearly in 2021, that's far from the truth. I think what people want is access to high-quality and reliable goods/services, rather than globalism or nationalism as a system.
FWIW, I like localism the most due to the psychological/cultural/scaling effects that it produces and hopefully, there's a minimally harmful way to get there without getting stuck in a nationalist rut.
> Does this argument explain why I can't think of a single country that has put forth a concerted effort to discourage cross border capital flows
This is a complex topic in a country where many pressure groups are fighting over policies.
In terms of immediate winners and losers, on the pro-globalism side, the winners are:
* investors that benefit from the race to the bottom
* the professional and managerial classes whose salaries rise as companies become more centers of management/coordinate/design with productive labor formed elsewhere
* service workers in select urban areas dominated by business services and consulting sectors
The losers are:
* blue collar workers
* service workers in smaller urban areas and rural areas
But in terms of long term effects, the losers are the vast majority of society, because de-industrialization creates a lot of social pathologies as we became a society with a shortage of meaningful work, the decline in solidarity hurts the nation's ability to coordinate to solve problems and deliver services efficiently, and the global supply chains are fragile, with many points of failure.
But the larger point is that the proponents of globalism are those who espouse liberalism, from the university professor who believes humans are isolated machines that maximize lifetime utility to those committing street violence against "fascists" -- that is, anyone who believes in national solidarity. This array is effectively the shock troops of globalism. It is one large movement fundamentally rooted in the idea that the purpose of life is to enjoy yourself as much as possible before you shuffle off to the grave, rather than being a part of a chain of being with your ancestors and grandchildren, in which the purpose of life includes making sacrifices for your group in order to contribute to your group's overall long term success.
Thus a society gripped by liberalism is one in which everyone defects. Consumers don't buy american made goods out of a commitment to the wellbeing of their society. Companies don't hire american workers out of a commitment to their fellow countrymen's wellbeing. Taxpayers do whatever they can to offshore wealth. It's everyone for themselves, and those types of societies just don't last very long. This is why we see liberal democracies in Western Europe and North America being rapidly eclipsed and outcompeted by well organized nationalistic societies in Asia.
It is for these reasons that societies have historically put up boundaries and exacted punishment on defectors and adopted institutions to inculcate loyalty and patriotism. When those borders are knocked down and the institutions subverted, don't be surprised when you are stabbed in the back by your countryman who doesn't give a sh*t that you and he are citizens of the same country.
> And it looks like globalism does help increase that if the goods your country produces are uniquely positioned in some way
You are talking about gains from trade. The issue is not gains from trade but trade deficits -- e.g. one way trade. These large Global capital inflows are not used to finance trade, they are used to finance trade deficits.
This is a bit odd for two reasons.
1. Taking steps to minimize your taxes is neither ethical or unethical, it's just basic common sense. It's like choosing to buy the cheaper apple when you go to the store. The whole reason why we have sin taxes and tax breaks is because legislators believe that it influences behavior and so they create this byzantine tax code in order to try to manage behavior. I guess whether you believe contributing to your 401K or claiming the mortgage interest deduction is immoral depends on your ethical code. To me, this is a category error -- if you think financial management can either increase or decrease your morality then you have a very decadent (and broken) moral code.
One can argue that such a complex tax code is bad policy, because it results in such a complex system that you need teams of lawyers to really understand it and take advantage of it, meaning that for ordinary people it's not worth it and the economy as a whole wastes far too much on tax professionals. But that never seems to stop anyone from clamoring for tax breaks for their pet cause.
2. The whole point of globalism as an enterprise is to support (and encourage) cross border capital flows. It is a system intended to allow foreigners purchasing up capital in the home country and home citizens doing the same overseas. These cross border capital flows finance trade deficits (without them, there would be no trade deficits).
But different nations have very different tax codes so this encourages a race to the bottom. Much like outsourcing labor. This race to the bottom effect is not some secret that requires an expose, it is an intended feature of the system. Why I am shocked, shocked, that americans would invest their money in the jurisdiction that yields the greatest tax-adjusted return. Just shocked!
This is why many people (such as myself) are opposed to globalism, but we are painted as silly xenophobes who don't want to eat French Brie. Well, OK, you wanted globalism -- this is globalism. And the only alternative to globalism is nationalism. Now one can make a claim that globalism as a value system is unethical and that only nationalism (or even better localism -- let each region have its own currency and borders and trade policy -- is ethical), but an individual who is stuck in a legal code that encourages and subsidizes globalism is not acting ethically or unethically when he buys a cheap TV from china, a car from Japan or sends his money to the Bahamas, as he is stuck with the tab of globalism (low interest rates, de-industrialization, political unrest, decline of solidarity, undermining of democracy, global financial crises) so he may as well enjoy the benefits -- access to the benefits of low wages in China and to the benefits of low taxes in the Bahamas. If you think one is unethical, then what about the other? And if you are being paid wages or earning returns determined by competition from the world, why not take advantage of cheap products and cheap taxes overseas? You cannot create your own private economic system just because you think the current one is a disaster.
Bottom line, if you don't like this type of tax arbitrage, then put a stop to it by discouraging (taxing) cross border capital flows. It would also put a stop to outsourcing and cheap TVs as well, and you would be instantly painted as a nationalist trade-war fighting xenophobe, but this is how you solve the problem, not by appealing to people to "buy American" or "store their wealth" in America with some faux ethical argument. Appeals to personal virtue to pay more than is needed (whether for TVs or taxes) ring pretty hollow.