Land ownership is registered for good public purposes which does not unreasonably destroy privacy concerns - it's usually obvious who (person or business) controls the land anyway (who should a tenant pay the rent to? who gets to decide if you can be a tenant?) and it gives people a great deal of confidence that they know that whoever is recorded in the government land registry as having a right to sell the property actually has that right. The common law approach of having to hold a series of documents that identify a continuous line of owners going back to some unconfirmable initial grant by a long dead king is not in the interest of the purchaser of the land.

Moreover, the market distortions taxing land (as the primary source of government income) will have are generally positive. A person can no longer buy a house in the hope that the land it sits on will double in value. They can only buy a house in the hope that they are capable of making a profit out of it; the land purchase merely gives them the right to improve it.

The same advantages may be visible for taxation of share holdings: instead of simply trying to profit from someone else's actions, you would buy shares because you think the dividends will exceed other income sources for the same purchase. It may be legitimate to have anonymous share holdings which require active detective work, so it's possible this would be an unreasonable invasion of privacy.

I know I've said that we shouldn't do public policy by taxes but taxing wealth instead of income probably isn't easy. We can tax income because one person's income is another person's expense if I understand how this works.

The answer seems to be that how well it works varies heavily on what the asset.

That's really not the case if the asset is owned by an opaque offshore company or trust - it's then pretty much impossible to know who the beneficial owner actually is.

You can make use of Adverse Possession to take ownership of land. The owner must reclaim their property, (and prove their ownership) or loose all rights to it. Unfortunately in UK squatting in a residential property is a crime, amusingly adverse possession still applies - you could claim someone's house but go to jail.

It's a weak threat though, most luxury apartment blocks used for 'investment' have security, you need to reside continuously for 10 years, they will send the owner a letter, etc.

I would like to see the principle of 'use it or lose-it' for limited public goods like land.

The terms like "money laundering" are only recent and swept through without properly understanding the privacy implications (and probably didn't envisage the pervasiveness of modern electronic surveillance & data breaches in today's digital world).

Anyhow, advancements in cryptographic Zero-knowledge proofs could hold the key in solving some of these problems (proof that funds are clean without reveling the source). Currently there are some scalability problems, but progress is being made so I'm hopeful. Wikipedia has a good write-up about the basics of ZKP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Citation very much needed. It depends on what you mean by "working".

There's references to tax evasion going back before the Roman Empire. For an example from the era of the Roman Empire, the topic of tax evasion is where the story of "give to Caesar what is his" (Mark 12:17) comes from. (I've found earlier Greek references going back to at least 300BC, but that's the easiest example to verify).

The state works better when it has funds to deliver on those plans - though there are many other factors that can disrupt it such as incompetence and corruption.

"Money laundering" may be a recent term, but it is not a recent concept. In fact some notable conquests on the ancient world wouldn't have been possible without concealing ill-gotten funds. It was a common tactic for avoiding paying tribute to a neighbour who defeated you.

Here's one example to ponder about: if we had this kind of surveillance earlier, would things like the Civil Rights Movement and generally the 60's counterculture come about? I.e. the era of "sex and drugs and rock'n'roll"? If only the authorities had the tools that they have today, oh boy! Don't like the liberation of sex? Is rock'n'roll the Devi's music? Fine. We'll close your PayPal account.

Privacy is very important for having a free society and freedom of expression. Financial privacy should be no exception.

If you measure anything, infant mortality, poverty, murder rates, diseases, nutrition, education, which of them fit any sensible definition of 'well'?

In my case, "worked well" meant something like a mix of: a) the world did not end, and b) everyday life in developed societies (which previously did not have total financial surveillance, but are now eager to achieve it) was more or less the same then as it is today.

In fact, to expand on b), it seems to me (admittedly from a completely intuitive and unquantified perspective) that we are quickly losing civil liberties today and that this aspect was better in the past.

You can apply the same style of reasoning to end-to-end encryption. Various actors are aiming for total surveillance in that area too, it is most likely a terrible idea and we have precedent that the world works reasonably well without it.

> Sure, why not? It has worked for many years before.

Taxing on trust alone is exactly where this little thread started.

as i understand, the "overwhelming majority" (lower and middle class) are not the focus of the problem here as they rarely use tax havens to circumvent taxes anyway (it's probably not cost effective). this is all about those who have the funds and motives to circumvent taxation, who happen to be a minority - even thought they're not a minority when it comes to taxable income; the 1% or whatever.

as for the rest of your argument, i don't completely agree. while you're probably right in practice, i.e. the authorities would have used their tools against those movements, the goals of those movements were different. the civil rights movement was probably illegal at the time but the goal was to change the laws to make it legal. same for sex. no millionaire wants to make tax evasion legal, as that would affect all tax payers, even those of the lower and middle class. they want that only for themselves.

i agree that (hard) drugs are probably a comparable example - it's illegal and puts a strain on society. on the other hand, use of hard addicting drugs can be categorized as an illness. so should we label money hoarding and tax evasion an illness? offer treatment options? allow them supervised safe spaces to evade taxes so we can offer them help?

i'm not convinced that financial privacy whould be no exception. there must be limits if it affects the others. i also don't think environmental pollution should be an issue of privacy - you shouldn't be able to pollute the air and claim it's nobodys business, as your factory stands on your own private plot of land.

Not to mention CGT been tweaked to ineffectiveness by previous governments by excluding assets from its calculations, notably housing, which has skewed CGT away from its original purpose and it's now more of a stick to whack at industries that aren't cozy with the current government.

In fact in many countries CGT is only used to refer to the LOWER version of the tax ... after all you should pay income tax whether you make your income digging ditches, house flipping, or day trading

He's spending more on everything than you are.

That doesn't even things up, of course, but then neither does the current system. It would arguably be closer to even.

The beauty of a universal sales tax (as an alternative to income tax), in addition to the fact that the wealthy consume more of everything, is that a transaction tax is more difficult to lobby loopholes into.

And, of course, it potentially doesn't need as large (read expensive) a bureaucracy to manage and enforce it.

It also removes the burden of record keeping/reporting from consumers and payroll tax from employers.

A lot of people have spent time thinking about the idea. One example: https://fairtax.org/

It's not a problem free solution of course, but neither is the current one. Someday a proposal for a transaction tax might even make it out of committee.

According to [1] Warren Buffett's house is worth .001% of his total wealth, at $652,619.

And for Warren Buffet to pay sales tax proportional to someone with $500,000 in assets buying a $50,000 car, he'd have to buy the world's most expensive car - a $5 million Koenigsegg of which only 3 were ever made - 1700 times over.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-modest-home-b...

It's a bit like a straw man fallacy.

It happens a lot less often on HN though in my experience.

Right after the bit you quoted I noted that WB buying an expensive car doesn't even things out.

The idea of sales tax as a replacement for income tax isn't new or lacking rigor. Over the years it's had a lot of support from both economists and politicians. The math, at least on the surface, does work.

Personally, I haven't spent enough time looking at it to have a lot of conviction one way or the other about it's viability.

But it's an interesting idea that isn't invalidated by comparing cars.