So, who ultimately appoints the directors? It sounds like it is Kamprad's heirs, but through some layers of indirection that prevents them from meddling directly.
There have been many inquires into this by Swedish journalists over the years, but it's a very dense structure of companies with unclear ownership and structure. So who controls it is unknown.
It is also a great tax evasion schema since the ownership is a charity (that donates money to "product design"), allowing IKEA to escape vast sums of taxation globally.
Avoidance, not evasion. If you're a very frugal person, it seems pretty normal to hate taxes. No point in saving on everything, yet then throwing x% away in taxes (yes, I am aware taxes fund a lot of good things, but at the same time a lot of money is wasted -- I'm sure Kamprad thought he could better manage and deploy that money)
Oh nice, if he thought he could use the money better, then sure, please carry on not paying taxes. Can I do the same? Or is that a privilege reserved for the mega-rich?
Or let's call a spade a spade, and let's call tax evasion tax evasion.
Want to stop avoidance? Make proper laws. If it's legal (even through lobbying), then it is legal. And frankly I don't see why you shouldn't if you legally can. But to each their own views on this.
You know who can stop avoidance? Politicians. They need to take responsibility. Feel free to shame multinationals or HNWIs for not paying taxes, but at the end of the day avoidance is only possible because politicians (or their advisors) make shoddy laws that aren't well thought out.
Tax avoidance is essentially nothing more than understanding the law and framework you are operating in well, and finding a way to place income outside of the application of the law. So make better laws -- that's the only thing that can stop (excessive) tax avoidance.
As long as politicians and don't put in a significant effort to close loopholes, I don't have any issue with tax avoidance.
Expecting profit-motivated companies to voluntarily choose to pay more tax than they have to is fundamentally doomed to failure. One of the powers of the free market is to encourage the elimination of inefficiency and waste—not that it's perfect at that—and we can't expect to both have our cake and eat it, in that sense.
I strongly agree that many companies should be contributing more to the state for the services that they use. But the way to do that is though robust and clear taxation frameworks, not some kind of general social pressure to pay an arbitrary, 'acceptable' amount of tax.
You can't have a robust and clear taxation framework in a plutocracy, because government is owned by the rich and run for the benefit of the rich. And they're hardly likely to support legislation that forces them to pay more tax. (Even if some are, there will always be a powerful lobbying effort agains any such move.)
The economic and political rhetoric around "freedom", "taxation is bad because government is bad", and so on is a propaganda exercise. It isn't something that appeared spontaneously as a self-evident social truth.
The more time I spend finding out about the history of political though in the US, the more I realise that the dominant narrative is the language and thinking of the hyper-rich, generated and maintained entirely for their benefit.
A related problem is that international stage is a market by itself. Nations compete for the business of large corporations. Which leads to creation of ridiculous tax exemptions and loopholes.
Countries can't have it both ways. You can't hate legal avoidance, while at the same time trying to steal tax revenue from your neighbour with similar tax incentives.
The preservation of these loopholes is not accidental -- they are deliberately left there for avoiders to take advantage of in exchange for political donations. The two groups work together in a corrupt and unethical partnership, while the populace can only watch from the sidelines fuming.
My activity in this realm has been to contribute to open source software, both as an author and as an administrator.
I see it as a win-win-win for workers (the developers who write the code), their employers (who invest in open source as a superior product), and the software industry and society at large (through increased productivity and a better model for collaboration).
Anyone can benefit from OSS, corrupt individuals included. I'm not sure if that kind of action can help improve legislation or decrease the number of loopholes.
What, you were serious when you demanded that I personally fix the world?
I'm still doing quite a bit and making the best use of my talents: way more than enough effort to call the facile critique of "start a political party".
Yes, I'm serious. All too many people just claim the system is broken and nothing can be done to fix it. Understanding how it works and fixing it can and does work. Can't speak for the US, but in Europe, it certainly can work.
Taking you at your word, then perhaps meditate on whether "Start a political party and fix it" is the kind of statement which would motivate an activist. In my experience (and I've donated literally years of my life to supporting and nurturing creative people), asking questions and listening, truly expressing interest in people's ambitions, is more effective than shaming people for not having taken on ridiculously unrealistic goals.
And by the way, I feel plenty satisfied that contributing to open source software in just about any capacity helps to ameliorate the problem of economic inequality, by empowering individual creators without harming capital -- and inequality is what's at the root of this tax issue.
The politicians will never bite the hand that feeds. The mega rich both write the laws and benefit from them, this does not excuse the behavior morally, only makes it legal on paper (which, apparently is enough for some of you).
But who is at fault here then? You can blame the wealthy all you want, but it would not be possible without the cooperation of politicians that are elected by the people.
It's interesting because you pretty much said it in your first paragraph: it's legal, through lobbying. Make proper laws? How, if it's the companies benefiting from the current state of affairs writing those laws? How, if the government isn't serving us the people, but the interests of those that can grease the palms of the persons in charge?
> If it's legal (even through lobbying), then it is legal.
But it's not legal. At least in theory, in most of continental european law the spirit of the law stands above the letter of the law, and just because you found a technicality does not make it legal.
You're not calling a spade a spade, you're calling a trowel a spade. While they have similar means of operation and mostly similar results, their definitions are commonly understood to be different. Trowels are single handed tools, spades are double handed. Tax avoidance is carried out publicly and legal, if possibly unethical, whereas tax evasion is carried out in secret and is illegal.
Sure, call tax evasion tax evasion, but AFAIK Kamprad wasn't doing it. Authorities go very hard against tax evasion, the illegal thing. Tax avoidance is by definition things that are legal, not tax evasion.
In fact authorities are pretty lenient on tax evasion by the hyper-rich. The number of convictions and jail sentences isn't zero, but given the sums involved it's pitifully low.
This is partly a resource problem. If you can pay advisors to create an impenetrable network of shell companies through which money disappears five levels down, you can pay lawyers to defend you if something goes wrong.
The authorities are far more likely to go after - and jail -
sole traders, smaller SMEs and consultants for five or six figure transgressions than near-billionaires with six, seven, or eight figure creative accounting.
I think there are also significant risks involved when facing the hyper-rich. SMEs are a dime a dozen. If some get sacked for skirting or breaking the rules, nobody cares. But if you piss off a large megacorp enough to make it e.g. build its new factory elsewhere, or move its business away entirely, then suddenly your political career is on the line.
Kamprad didn't really move to avoid income taxes; Sweden has all these decades had a relatively high income taxation, even when Kamprad moved back to Sweden from Switzerland.
What he ran away from was wealth taxation that showed intention of becoming confiscatory, meaning his company would be taken from his control by the government.
Please cut the ’avoidance, not evasion’ bullshit. This scheme is outright evasion, legalized by lobbying in Brussels against national law. You know that otherwise you wouldn’t care to point out this nuisance.
I understand the frustration, but I really think this is an important distinction to make.
Evasion is solved by rigorously enforcing existing tax frameworks. Avoidance is solved by closing loopholes. They're two different problems—although they share some things in common—and they require two different solutions.
The reason these particular laws inspire such revulsion is that they are bought and paid for by the fabulously wealthy. The law itself is immoral and illegitimate.
Even those of us who are sure that after cutting down all the laws, we could not stand in the winds that would blow then (to paraphrase Bolt)... can feel appalled at such laws, their originators, facilitators, and apologists.
> I really think this is an important distinction to make [...] they require two different solutions.
Agreed. The problem, and the source of the frustration, is that your average poster on hacker news (or average human being on earth) has 0% influence on either of the solutions. It is the mega rich who hold all the power, who have the resources, energy, and clout to play these games.
It doesn't really matter how you distinguish evasion and avoidance, both are driven by the same motivations, and where the line separating the two stands in any given jurisdiction is defined less by the qualities of the actual actions, and more by how much the rich have managed to encode into law vs. how safe they feel openly breaking it.
An argument, if anything, for open, transparent, and responsible governance. Certainly something that we are particularly struggling with at the moment.
Sorry, but why is it the EU's fault if countries create tax incentives? I've read that previously in UK pro-Brexit media but never understood how that can be true. I'm pretty sure that neither the Netherlands nor Ireland were forced to create low-tax regimes.
I propose a new word to solve this problem: avoision. This word describes a practice that is in all essences tax evasion but may not be technically found by courts to be illegal, or may be an untested grey area legally.
I think it's a nice, cromulent word that we can all agree on.
The commonly understood definition of tax evasion includes that it must be illegal. You are simply appropriating more severe terminology in an attempt to inflate the strawman.
I can't speak for the majority of people but I'd venture that more people would put "morally sketchy and ethically bankrupt tax avoidance" into the "tax evasion" bucket than not.
You find the introduction of definitional precision to be an annoying, cheap trick?
What exactly are you achieving if you don’t rigorously define your terms and agree upon them? You make it sound like insisting on that is just a method of sophistry, but it’s the foundation of human communication. We cannot possibly talk about anything in a productive way if we’re not being precise in our terminology. Nuance and context have a meaningful impact on our conclusions, and legal definitions aren’t pointless. You can debate the merits of those definitions, but to hand wave them away because the conversation is “informal” is silly.
It is objectively false and unproductive to conflate tax avoidance and tax evasion. If you have a disagreement about the ethics of tax avoidance and believe it is meaningfully similar to tax evasion, that argument can certainly be made. But it is a legitimate point that tax avoidance is a separate thing from tax evasion. If you want to challenge that, you need to essentially debate the axiomatic legal foundations - i.e. do you find the relevant legislation unethical? Do you think tax avoidance is a net negative even if it’s illegal? Etc. The legal context isn’t pedantry, it’s intrinsically relevant to the topic.
On the other hand, what you’re doing is dismissing an attempt at precision, which actually bypasses attempts to have these very legitimate debates. No conversation has been hijacked here. Moreover, even if you call this an “informal conversation”, it will persuade people to change their opinions or reinforce them in a meaningful way. You cannot avoid that reality by temporarily surrendering rigor and selectively choosing what’s relevant to the topic.
If you disagree with the legal distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, make a compelling argument for it. But don’t dismiss a well established legal distinction without a commensurately compelling reason to do so.
I see a ton of imprecision in technical discussions here daily, and that's a topic on which one would expect some expertise here. And yet the pedantry that receives is far less annoying than the inevitable tax avoidance cliche-rants.
Why? Because there the pedantry is at least topical. Here, it is arguing language in order to grind an axe on a side issue almost completely unrelated to the Ikea founder.
Natural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions. In the latter you argue against the meaning of a word instead of the intended meaning of the argument.
In point of fact, it’s pedantic to dismiss an argument from legality on the grounds that it’s “legal” and not “ethical”, because legalislation (and more importantly the reasoning behind it) is a subset of ethics. A carefully considered discussion will include the existing literature that has come out of previously considered discussion; therefore it is fully reasonable to consider legal arguments in a discussion of ethics.
To reiterate, you need not agree with legal arguments, but to call them pedantic or irrelevant is simply incorrect. They’re exceptionally topical.
>Natural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions.
What you describe is not the only view of language. If you are not being pedantic, you might consider the Wittgenstien's view on how language is like a game.
So there are different classes of language games, and one can argue that legal one is not the one being played out in a internet forumn. Legalism is language of courts, derives its meaning from its use to resolve disputes. So deriving the meaning of ethics as used in normal conversation language game from legal grounds is being pedantic.
This is not a philosophy seminar, you're not engaging in normal conversational norm setting at this point, and this game was boring in high school. Have fun, but you'll have to have it with someone else.
Your view of rigorous language is debatable. In wittgenstienian sense Language is its use. So one might argue you are playing different language game (aka legal language) in a informal conversation game in a internet forum.
It's not semantic, or a legal definition. It's a very explicit and important difference – 'evasion' is illegally avoiding taxation, and 'avoidance' is legally avoiding taxation.
Messing these two different concepts up helps nobody and just muddles the two issues further. Avoidance is a problem that must be tackled on a global scale; but first, we have to be honest about what it is.
> Not important when discussing ethical implication of not paying taxes in the context of HN.
Legal definitions are not important for discussing ethical implications?
This is a wildly unsubstantiated claim that you’re positing without any compelling argument behind it. What you’re saying is implicitly tantamount to saying a discussion of legislation is irrelevant in a discussion of ethics. Doing that literally dismisses entire schools of ethical philosophy.
You don’t have to agree with legal definitions a priori, just like you don’t need to agree with particular ethical arguments. But you absolutely need to consider them for a well reasoned discussion about ethics. The legal definitions are there precisely because of past ethical discussions - legislative arguments are, categorically, ethical arguments. In fact, you could define legislation as the implementation of an ethical specification.
Have to disagree. Laws may have something like an ethical base, but only as a nod to practicality - people have to believe in them. They are pragmatic to the core. Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics?
> Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics?
So you’re not disagreeing then. We’re saying the same thing: legal definitions are relevant and should be included in discussion, but they do not have to be agreed with because are not intrinsically correct.
I didn’t ask the parent comment for agreement with legislation, I asked for acknowledgement in an ethical discussion because it’s relevant.
Yeah, I think that is a little rich of IKEA. They get tons of goodwill from the Swedish system but contributes very little to it themselves. For example, the Swedish King or some government official is often present when IKEA opens a new store somewhere in the world. If an new one is opened in Sweden, the local politicians help them out by adding bus stops and even new bus lines servicing it.
It's kind of crazy given that IKEA in reality is a Dutch charity for tax reasons. At this point in time, IKEA is about as Swedish as Media Markt.
"registered basically nowhere" != "moving its HQ to China"
Registration is a matter of paperwork. Incorporation is a legal fiction. IKEA is a Swedish company for all intents and purposes, except tax liability. Taxation isn't the essence of Swedishness.
If Apple did some legal magic and moved its company registration to Sweden (and paid any and all due taxes in Sweden), it still wouldn't make the iPhone a Swedish product (to the extend the iPhone claims a nationality, which is doesn't really, so it's not a great comparison).
It still seems an hypocrisy to me. In any case, they use the flag as a marketing tool, something which, from my point of view, doesn't show much respect for the flag.
I think there is an unfortunate belief among many of HN’s primary user demographics that regional identity is the same as what political apparatus controls a region. I think it’s easy to fall into this trap when you and your community lack any kind of coherent cultural origin story, as many Americans do.
