Norway Shrugged

To their complaint: Norway is exceedingly hostile to investments that do not result in Norwegian economic investment beyond the borders of a given business. The 1% tax on virtual wealth is explicitly targeting theoretical unicorns to ensure that VC funding is taxed. Here, the first year’s effective tax would have been 10M owed out of 70M invested, at 14%. Whether that’s excessive or not for an investment is worth discussing in the context of Norway’s normal corporate tax rate, 22-25%, which they do not do. I shouldn’t have had to do this math: their post, if it’s seriously intended to influence economic policy, should have at minimum laid out these figures.

To their emotions: Were they not consulting with an accountant and a lawyer when they accepted the investment? Did they knowingly accept the investment and begin planning their exit from the country immediately? Is this a planned marketing campaign that uses taxation outrage to generate free PR for their company among taxation-hostile audiences that are more likely to pay a cryptocoin investment product?

Given the data-free post and the apparent naïveté of their founder when faced with investment and taxation in Norway, when the focus of the business on providing investment advice — either this business deserves to collapse due to its founder’s incompetence, or this post is a honeypot trap for extracting PR wealth from the cryptocoin faithful. The post presents no new arguments against Norway’s valuation tax that weren’t already hashed out at length when it was first imposed, so I decline to give them free PR by engaging with their outrage.

ps. While I largely disagree with Rand’s views, I am not unfamiliar with them. The implicit but unstated framing of their cryptocoin investor product as a peer of Reardon steel or Taggart Transcontinental here is laughable. No product is produced that stands above and apart from its peers, Rand would label their target customers as ‘moochers’, and their post is a coarse mockery of the impassioned monologues of Atlas. Their flight to Switzerland is no silent quitter abandonment of their enterprise, and they certainly would not be invited to the Gulch before the collapse.

> High income with short work days, free healthcare, free daycare, free education and beyond.

If the author doesn't value these for the people around them then perhaps he should move somewhere else.

1: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/tax-deduction-ca...

Forbes and other finance magazines create top lists and bio stories presented entirely as if the valuations of businesses are the same as actual money. When Amazon shares go up or down a few percent overnight it's reported in the media as if a convoy of trucks has dumped dollar bills at Bezos' mansion. "Bezos made xx millions per minute".

Spreading such misinformation everywhere for decades can't be good, and it seems Norway has fallen victim to it.

> There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

-- John Rogers

Everytime it's the same.

It reminds me of that study that found that people who serve in executive roles for prolonged periods of time develop a sort of brain damage where their "mirroring" neural process becomes impaired.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c...

This sounds like amazing success. Now no one has to worry about those people using their money to command Norway's significant resources to implement their stupid ideas. Money is not a resource. It's IOU from the society to the guy with money. Pushing the rich out of the country is letting someone else pay for those IOUs with their work and resources.

If you think it's a loss because those people might have great ideas because they got some in the past that made them rich, it's usually not the case. To land on the very top you need very significant amount of luck. And luck is something that you get case by case. So they have about as good ideas as next 10000 people that didn't have as much luck. But the blast radius of the stupid ideas of those on the very top is huge because of how much money they accumulated. Pushing them out of the country is a huge benefit.

the viral tweets critizing the wealth tax are by elon musk, marc andreessen, paul graham and alex svanevik (also an onchain data founder). certainly what they have in common here is that they would stand to lose some wealth from the wealth tax!

I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.

You are not a fugitive, just because you are expected to contribute to society.

…Perhaps by realizing a portion of the gains and handing over the resulting wealth?