He had to pay an exit tax on all his unrealized gains at the moment of rescinding citizenship, so it's almost certain that his taxes were much higher if he did so last year.

Details please, or it didn't happen.

Just for your own information: tax avoidance is legal and expected. Tax evasion is criminal and can result in prison. The distinction is that tax evasion is when you misrepresent the facts in your tax filings.

To my knowledge, the exit tax didn't exist before 2008.

>He doesn't want his hard earned wealth pissed away by clueless bureaucrats.

Yeh, but guess he likes driving on roads and making use of many of the other public services taxes pay for

Actually, doesn't own a car, and spends most of his time in third world nations doing said philanthropy - but I'm not here to talk about his relative merits, just that fatca is ineffectual.

To recap:

[1] Random person on Hacker News personally "knows" a billionaire.

[2] Billionaire renounced U.S. citizenship without having to realize any significant capitals gains.

[3] Billionaire doesn't own a car. He just spends his time touring Africa, solving AIDS or malaria like Bono or Bill Gates.

[4] Billionaire has a secret lair, from which he dresses up in a costume and fights crime by night.

I could be making some of these up. I started to have serious doubts right at [1], and completely got off the train by [2].

so he just earned all his money without using any government built/administrated infrastructure or any technology that was developed using government/tax money or any common good? I'm impressed. Must be hard developing your own internet, electrical network, build your own road infrastructure, legal system and police enforcement, schools and hospitals for your employees and in the end still end up billionaire.

As much as we like or dislike it, as a matter of fact we all use common goods and services provided by the government. For better or worse.

Perhaps some of those assumptions that you take to be axiomatic regarding the role of taxation in society, he did not agree with.

Use of public resources does not obligate you to pay taxes. The enforcers with guns obligate you to pay taxes. If you can escape the enforcers, you can escape the taxation. And that guy escaped the enforcers.

Also, you may want to take a closer look at the ownership and maintenance of communication networks, power grids, and hospital systems. Many of the so-called "public utilities" in the US are actually for-profit corporations that sometimes have to answer to a government regulator if a customer complains loudly enough. In fact, the only federally owned power grid company that I am aware of within the US is the Tennessee Valley Authority (though plenty of hydroelectric dams elsewhere are also federally owned), and it still buys 10% of the power that it sells from privately owned sources. It should also be noted that the TVA is not supported by taxes, but actually turns a profit.

As tax dollars are also spent on such meritorious projects as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the F-35 joint strike fighter, domestic surveillance networks, eminent domain abuse, civil forfeiture abuse, forced insurance schemes, chronic fiscal mismanagement, and countless others that an unfortunate minority of voters may consistently object to, I suppose that someone who avoids or evades paying taxes will have to replicate those things on his own as well.

If you tie an ethical obligation for paying taxes to anything a government does, you necessarily imply that withholding payment is an ethical means of protest against anything you object to the government doing, in proportion to the amount it spends on doing that thing. That strays dangerously far from the realpolitik situation, where your government will take its pound of flesh from you, whether you like what it does with it afterward or not.

The heart of the matter is that anyone or anything with an obscene amount of money has to eventually deal with London and New York, and the latter connection provides the access point by which the US IRS can bully and browbeat international banks into complying with any arbitrary and capricious rule that the US cares to institute, with the threat of losing an extortionate portion of any quantity of their money that passes through New York.

Many Americans suffer from the common delusion that life should, in some way, be fair, despite all available evidence to the contrary. This fuels all sorts of irrational outrage and bad behavior. In this case, expatriates are left to wonder "why is the US government spending so much effort on screwing me over for no reason?"

Just because one drives on government roads does not mean that they believe that is how things should be.

That's sorta the point. Expats aren't using the roads those taxes are paying for. That's why every other country in the world, aside from Eritrea, doesn't tax you when you're living abroad.

I don't think madaxe_again is disagreeing with you there.

> and the evaders keep on evading

Well, I guess that he cannot avoid the taxes on fuel either.

Billions are never "hard earned". Do the math :-)

Yeah those must be some very long nights in the office. Makes me wonder where my billions went the many days I worked 9AM-3:30AM launching websites. Lost my sanity and health, but didn't even receive my million.

Can't imagine how hard a billionaire worked.

Also the classic way people go down for tax fraud is migrating countries, earning income, but then paying no tax to either.

> The guy gives crazy amounts to philanthropic causes instead.

This. As a someone who leans libertarian, folks give me the "you must be greedy" look when I mention that I have an issue with income taxation. Not at all - like your friend, I'm rather selective about where I donate my money - to causes that matter to me. I'm a generous person and consider the coercion of the state to be neither altruistic nor efficient.

I'm honestly more offended by the implications that bureuacracy is a poor value proposition. Social security has minuscule overhead, government healthcare has far lower $ / covered individual than most private insurances with equal or greater satisfaction rates, while a number of private philanthropies piss away a large % of their receipts on fundraising & administrative overheads.

Bureaucracy does tend towards bloat and failure, both in the private or public sectors. I can quibble with your examples (I don't think they're appropriate), but even if we allow that they are indeed successes, for each one I can find a handful of very consequential failures (DoD, VHA, HUD, etc). Consider especially where government is tasked with providing a service, instead of shuffling money around to pay for it. This is admittedly a US-centric perspective, but why should I want to trade our poor governance for, say, European institutions with their attendant sclerosis?

The problem is often how the money has been made at first place. Bill Gates might be the biggest philanthropist in the world he didn't think about ethics that much when he ran Microsoft like the mob.

So you took advantage of a system paid for by others and then decided you wouldn't contribute back. That's fine, but also pretty much the definition of greedy/selfish.

Regardless what your "hardship" story maybe, it would have been harder if everyone acted the way you do now.

That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed on HN.

What? I haven't taken advantage of anyone. I file and pay my taxes like everyone else. It's just that dropping bombs on impoverished people and bailing out corporations do not align with my personal values. How does this make me greedy?

But you are cherry picking outcomes. Does a police force, an army, a functioning society align with your personal values?

I agree government make mistakes, but that isn't an argument for getting rid of government, that's an argument for getting rid of mistakes.

I didn't say get rid of government. There are plenty of nations with functioning societies and services ranging from those with zero income tax to a flat tax.

... Zero income tax? Care to name one. I would hazard a guess they derive revenue from some other source as their middle class is either non existent or they have piles of oil.

So you are saying you want higher business tax? Or a flat tax rate... How does the mechanism of tax relate to your view of coercion though? Isn't it coercion regardless the rate?