It's also weird to even call this a tax dodge. If you make money in New York and not London then you should be paying taxes to New York and not London because your operations are using New York streets and New York sewers and hiring kids from New York schools etc., and that's what those taxes are paying for. You haven't used any of London's infrastructure to do it so they don't get any of the money.

If you make money in some free port or <unspecified location> which is so un-tied to any other jurisdiction that you have no meaningful operations in any of them, why should any of them have a claim to the money? None of them have done anything to earn it.

That seems like the flaw here, not the other thing. Why should the US government have any entitlement to tax activity that occurs entirely outside their jurisdiction?

> At any rate, where a company is registered or where an asset is held doesn't necessarily have much bearing on where work is done or what infrastructure is used and to what extent.

But that's the point. They're meant to tax in the places where this sort of thing happens. If you have a building somewhere, there is property tax. If you make sales somewhere, there is sales tax or VAT. If you have employees somewhere (or are an employee and perform work somewhere), there is payroll tax.

Storing art can be done most anywhere, so naturally it happens in the places that allow it under the most favorable terms, but what's the problem there? It's the same as companies putting their facilities in some other jurisdiction because it has lower taxes. It's the normal and expected thing and one of the rare incentives for governments to improve their cost efficiency through competition.

Tax evasion doesn't cease to be tax evasion because you don't feel like you owe the government taxes.