I find it ironic in an interesting way that on HN there is such a strong privacy bent generally, but on the topic of financial privacy it seems to be the reverse
Individuals should have financial privacy, but corporations are not people (fight me). Trying to equate individual liberties with those corporations is a massive source of societal issues but shills keep advocating for it because it's very much in the corporations interests to have those rights, which when wielded by an entity with such vast resources, puts said entity on a very uneven playing field with any actual humans. As such, we need to level that playing field.
They're superficially groups of people but the legal reality that makes them exist is the fact that they're legally separate from the people who comprise them.
To put it differently, they're not groups of people, they're a distinct legal "entity" that can then be fractionally owned by people while shielding them from whatever it's doing.
This gives it special powers, you can't arrest a corporation or send it to jail. It can act against the will of some of its fractional owners, it can own its own property, and it can legally participate in electoral politics, beyond how any or all of its owners are legally able to participate.
Hear me out, but maybe we should have more privacy as individuals, such that the gains that an LLC currently provides you as a sole proprietor are similar, but the privacy an LLC provides should be reduced.
The problem remains - you want to reduce the privacy an LLC provides - but in the end, it's all individuals who are protecting their privacy with an LLC.
So by reducing the privacy an LLC provides, you are reducing the privacy of individuals.
There's a marked difference between an individual's right to privacy and that of a business. Shell companies are financial instruments designed to obfuscate ownership, usually for tax evasion purposes. Therefore increased transparency is, for the most part, in the public's interest.
Why is it in the public interest to know who owns a company? Sure for specific groups of people, transparency is in order (elected politicians etc.) but wouldn’t financial disclosure laws work better? Why isn’t it the general public’s prerogative to know that I own 5% of a shell company (LLC) set up specially for the purpose of pooling an investment in a new venture?
shell companies are just companies, suppose the vast majority of which are formed for perfectly normal reasons,
If they can have "free speech" and are "legal persons" then the public _surely_ has an interest in knowing who is benefiting (the ultimate beneficial owner) from that corporation's actions.
It's in the public interest only because of the particular way that taxes work.
If sleeping with someone was a taxable event, would that mean that it's OK to spy on people's bedrooms? After all, it's in the public interest.
In principle, I think that taxing only land ownership and pollution is the theoretically fair way to do taxation. And land ownership doesn't require obtaining any data that isn't necessarily known by the government in the first place.
I think the people commenting on this thread are a subsection of HN and probably not the same ones with strong libertarian viewpoints that people sometimes associate with HN. I would agree there is a weird disconnect here.
