You are falsely assuming that every country's tax policy is reasonable or fair. Look at the United States policy on foreign assets which effectively amounts to double taxation for no other reason than "we don't like rich people" / "we don't like our citizens not living here".
> We need to get this money back under our control - if only to prevent social unrest from the 2/3rd of the US which have less than 1000$ in liquid savings.
It's not your money to begin with, it belongs to the people who rightfully earned it, not the government, nor the poor. Peoples' assets don't exist to serve as piggy banks for social programs and redistribution.
It's up to debate if companies like Microsoft, Apple, AirBnB, Facebook or Uber "rightfully" earned their money - or if they did so by blatantly ignoring or skirting the laws for a long time.
Note that all companies I mentioned have a history of getting fined for violating labor, anti-trust or data protection laws.
For that we have democracy. If you don't like the decisions taken by your countrymen, you should not get to extricate yourself so easily. A people has the right to tax its capital if it so pleases, and unless you can substantiate this being not right or unfair with, say, an equivalent to the human rights declaration, go ahead. But we both know this is not typically what tax havens are about; they are about not paying taxes. Besides, what's fair about being able to avoid taxes, where most people can't? Why do the rich get to pass the bill to others but the poor don't? Lotta holes in that line of reasoning.
> It's not your money to begin with, it belongs to the people who rightfully earned it, not the government, nor the poor.
Capital is not and should not magically be excluded from democratic control; and in fact fiat currencies, i.e. all of them, are precisely not your property. They are tokens distributed by a government within a context; the state and all its inhabitants. Speaking about fairness: merely having gathered many of these tokens does not mean you did so fairly or that you deserve them. It just means that you did.
For that we have democracy. If you don't like the decisions taken by your countrymen, you should not get to extricate yourself so easily
The same corruption that leaves tax loopholes all over the place will prevent sanctions against tax havens - them existing is a desirable state by the corrupt that can purchase influence to perpetuate their existence.
As far as I can tell, they’re just the most attractive places for such activities thanks to their low taxes. Laundering your money in Scandinavia probably wouldn’t be more difficult, it’d just be more expensive.
That is a big list of entire countries if you include legal persons in the definition
Sounds like you are describing almost every single country on earth!
I think what you really object to is countries offering attractive tax regimes.
"Its absurd we are not being hosed equally"
instead of
"Why are we being hosed at all"
Countries finance themselves from the international debt markets, and pay the interest with their taxes and with future debt issuances. They pay prior investors with future investor money, and convince future investors by periodically paying the interest and they idea that the country could pay more interest any time it wants (by raising taxes, or straight expropriation of property). All this means that the things that were going to get funded and built and supported were already chosen to do so and greater tax collection would have no bearing on that. (Some smaller taxes directly fund certain institutions, but its not like a road or school or social service in a poor area would ever actually get prioritized.)
I really think I don't fully understand you here. If "It's absurd we are not being hosed equally" comes from "It's absurd some people are rich enough to ", then, "Why are we being hosed at all" means, "Why do we pay taxes at all?" Are you implying the government could just keep minting debt without any tax base?
No. You're getting closer to asking the right questions. The universe of possibilities is just much broader than the public discourse has been led to.
Or we will see countries like Dubai, Malta, Cyprus and other tax havens as collaborators and sanction them into oblivion.
Places that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries do not deserve existence. The amount of money laundered and stored away in tax havens is the money that used to fund social services, healthcare or living wages before the world allowed free and unimpeded movement of money. We need to get this money back under our control - if only to prevent social unrest from the 2/3rd of the US which have less than 1000$ in liquid savings.