Norway Shrugged (2024)

I guess I'm in the weird position of being a leftist who is generally against wealth taxes. Taxing non-liquid wealth like this requires the government to be able to accurately assess the value of these assets and that's an unrealistic burden IMO. I would rather address the "Buy, Borrow, Die" paradigm from other angles, like restricting the classes of assets one can borrow money against to force liquidation and therefore be subject to a traditional capital gains tax instead. That way the market takes care of the problem of pricing the asset and society can impose a tax on that valuation.

Here's my solution: Make being a billionaire illegal.

That's it. It's incumbent upon asset-holders to remain under the limit. It's up to them how close to the line they wish to tread.

No one becomes a billionaire ethically...no one produces that level of value, and absolutely no one needs that much money. And we have evidence that it literally breaks your brain when you attain that level of wealth. It's only possible to attain through exploitation. If you are found to hold a billion dollars in assets, you go to prison and forfeit all of your assets, so it's up to them to manage their assets accordingly. Give it away, pay your workers more, distribute it however you want, but a single person cannot be allowed to control that much capital - full-stop.

If you flee the country, any assets you leave behind are forfeit and seized. You will not be allowed to retain the wealth you accumulated on the on the backs of taxpayers and labourers...it will be forcefully redistributed for the public good.

For any country that does this, extreme wealth disparity will be eliminated. If there are countries that allow billionaires exploit the working class and public infrastructure, then they can go build their fortunes there. Equitable, civilised countries will outlaw it. Billionaires only exist because we allow them to.

Someone with less than a billion will be just fine, and can enjoy a reasonable, moderate amount of wealth in peace.

What all these people fail to mention is that at about the same time as the increase in wealth tax, another tax rule was made stricter. Before nov. 29 2022, you could take your unrealized profits abroad for five years to reset your cost basis for the realized gains tax. Meaning you could essentially spend five years to get rid of your tax burden. This tax amount is significantly larger than the wealth tax. And many of these 100 people moved before that.

This article is from 2024. They can defer this tax now. [1]

> 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...

Is the Norwegian government’s theory that a modern company might never realize their gains, and avoid taxation indefinitely, and thus this is a forcing mechanism to extract some tax revenue?

Magazines all over the world talk about the wealth of business owners as if it is equivalent to the wealth of say sports stars or musicians, who get paid millions to their bank accounts.

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.

So, let me see if I understand this right: They took an investment of 70M at a valuation of 1000M, in a country that has a well-known 1% tax of valuation, but they failed to write payment of that tax into the funding papers and fled the country to dodge a 10M annual tax bill.

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.

So what's the point of taxing unrealized gains specifically? Why not wait until the gains are realized, tax them then, and still collect on average the same tax income? This would result in the same yearly tax income for the government, except in the years immediately after implementing or increasing unrealized gains taxes.

Is it just to force entrepreneurs to sell more stock and get more loans, as a gift to the financial sector?

Edit: On second thought, taxing unrealized gains results in lower tax income - the financial sector will take its cut, and that cut has to come from somewhere.

Everytime!

> 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.

Atlas Shrugged references didn't do this guy any favors

How narcissistic do you have to be to come up with a title like this about yourself?

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...

What are the train references all over the text? is it because of the tax?

the author founded dune.com which is a crypto onchain data company. there is a focus on ethereum, solana, tron, stablecoins, prediction markets and the like.

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!

Oh god, this guy instantly lost credibility to me for mentioning Atlas Shrugged.

> Norway's entrepreneurs are now indeed disappearing from society. In the past two years alone, a staggering 100 of Norway's top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50% of that group's wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

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.

TL;DR: Norway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. "Wealth" here includes the book value of private companies, which presents cash flow problems for founders of startups with high paper valuations (like the author, who founded unicorn Dune Analytics).

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.

Slop. Feels like a child onesided complaining and detached from a regular reality.

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

Bullshit article

The teenagey reference to Atlas Shrugged, a book that hails selfishness as the highest human virtue, coupled with the sloppy writing makes me highly suspicious of the competence of the author. Good riddance for Norway I guess.

> facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income…. I still don’t know how I was supposed to pay the tax

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