Some geniuses think that value can be created out of thin air. Like if an artist paints a painting.

No. This is false. The artist needs food to survive... he needs money to buy food. Who paid him money for the art? Another artist? So you can have a whole economy of artists producing nothing but art (aka value) out of thin air and they don't need to eat or buy food? You think that's actual value? That's a non functional economy. Someone needs to produce food in this economy. Someone needs to produce the energy to make the paint to create the art.

When you follow the chain all "value" is connected to something concrete. Energy, food, etc. And ALL of these things are finite.

When you think of value it can be thought of as entropy. Any action that lowers entropy requires an energy input.

That being said. Value is never created. It is always taken. There are two root sources. The earth and the sun. All value is sourced from mining energy from the earth or mining energy from the sun. (Technically it all comes from the sun as energy in the earth <oil> comes from the sun).

The issue with both of those sources is that the rate at which energy can be taken as an upper limit. The sun can only produce so much energy and we can only extract it at a specific rate. The earth is the same, although the earth has a much more smaller reservoir that can be used up in a foreseeable future.

Just had to rant here. Because the idea that value can be created out of thin air is just completely and utterly false. You can overpay for something, but in the end when you follow the chain... the creation of value is taken from limited reservoirs of low entropy. Intuitively we are using something up, and the scientific reality ALSO reflects this fact. Trust your intuition, don't come up with convoluted ways around this because it's FALSE.

PS: actually I was wrong about the earth. coal, geothermal and nuclear energy are exclusively from the earth and not the sun but these also have an upper limit and a limited rate of extraction.

If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.

Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.

In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?

I suggest that you could count on one hand the number of people in the entire history of humanity who could and would hide this kind of wealth who didn't earn it through somehow relying on others and/or society's structure.

None of this stuff is permanent.

So USD flows into Cayman banks, and those banks need to do something with the massive amounts of money just sitting there. So what do they do? They buy U.S. Treasuries. And half a trillion dollars is just their holdings in U.S. debt, imagine how much more money is hidden in those accounts and invested in other assets.

1. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...

— Leona Helmsley

Musk, for example, invested hundreds of millions into Tesla, his entire fortune. Soon afterwards, he was within hours of personal and business bankruptcy.

SpaceX also was one explosion away from total bankruptcy.

Say what you will about Musk, the man has a lot of guts. Without those guts, there'd be no Tesla and no SpaceX and no Starlink.

The correct approach is to require all those people worried about the “Debt” to hand over any liquid savings they have in bank accounts or retirement funds. Since that is what is causing it by accounting identity.

After all if they consider it to be such a problem they should put their money where their mouth is.

Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton to understand how the system actually works.

Amusingly a larger deficit means government has more space to spend, not less. People saving means they are not spending which means resources are left underemployed.

Debt to GDP is not a relevant concern in a free floating currency has Japan has demonstrated for decades.

Fixed that for ya!

what do you mean by that? support by doing data journalism? more like hacktivism?

So, at least subscribe to one of the papers !

(I know, sorry HN, I asked people to pay for a service that could be financed by ads to gather more data - aka more food for the algo. Sorry.)

Actually, I'd say there's three such networks: ICIJ, GIJN and OCCRP. They're not really competitors, each serving slightly different purposes, and there's plenty of collaboration and overlap between their members.

Source: I'm not in that world anymore, but I knew about Panama Papers long before it was public and have my name in the credits in some of the collaborations with ICIJ.

Update: Maybe it was the program Rambam where the makers set up their own tax haven based on the methods of the big corporations. Information in Dutch:

https://pers.bnnvara.nl/rambam-ontduikt-belasting-met-medewe...

You may be required to have a local agent, and they will add their address and names as the nominee shareholders so you remain anonymous. Then with an LLC, the company can open bank accounts and you can move money. Any money made offshore is non-taxed locally.

No different to Delaware.

The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).

There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.

I talked to someone recently who claimed to know someone personally with 16,000 metric tons of gold. He claims that there is waaay more gold than is officially on the books. Hard to believe… but maybe not. He claims that there is unbelievable wealth out there—many more hundred-billionaires than official stats hold. Ok. Who knows?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia

Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia (née Vella; 26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta. She was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers and subsequent assassination by a car bomb. Caruana Galizia focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and international reputation was built on her regular reporting of misconduct by Maltese politicians and politically exposed persons.

If we're talking about wealth not income, then no, not really. We don't usually think of asset seizure as "taxes". In other words, one "taxes" flows (like capital gains and wages) and "siezes" stocks (like bank deposits and equity).

"You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable"

I wasn't making value judgement, but yes, if you look at it with the assumption these wealthy individuals are cold, calculating, self-interested actors, then it's "expected and understandable" to me.

"That seems counterintuitive to me, at least."

I think you're using "intuitive" as a shorthand for "the way things ought to work in a righteous world", where I find incentives and disincentives to be a more intuitive way of understanding the world.

"wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth"

To be fair, it's not necessarily fraudulent to have offshore accounts or to conceal your identity (it can certainly be depending on the circumstances). Technically I have an "offshore" account, I just happen to be living outside the US and a US citizen. I also use mechanisms to conceal my identity when registering domain names, for example. Is it the same thing, no, but these people might not technically be doing anything illegal.

It isn't necessarily true that those systems "brought them their wealth" either. Plenty of them likely inherited wealth that was accumulated long before the current systems were put in place (granted, it could very well have been accumulated illegitimately 300 years ago).

(Again, I'm not saying any of this is how the world should work, I'm trying to look at the world dispassionately and describe how things seem to be)

At the level of wealth we're discussing, these individuals probably have to think about "diversifying" among nation-states. Instead of worrying about whether to short the tech sector, they're worried about a country being invaded and the new puppet regime deciding to nationalize the hydroelectric dam they financed. Or they may be worrying about whether their country of residence will pass a law that the biggest national telcom must sell the government a majority stake (i.e., their share) at a government-mandated price denominated in an inflating currency... with expert bureaucratic efficiency.

So... no, not really taxes.

Lawsuits, divorces, taxes on unrealized income, taxes contested by another state, offshore earning complications, ...

The trauma of giant unexpected bills or losses can make people do ... things.