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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Inching closer to the eradication of financial privacy

FinCEN has new rules taking effect over the next year and a half that require basically all companies to disclose the "beneficial owners".

The rule will require most corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities created in or registered to do business in the United States to report information about their beneficial owners—the persons who ultimately own or control the company, to FinCEN. Designed to protect U.S. national security and strengthen the integrity and transparency of the U.S. financial system, the rule will help to stop criminal actors, including oligarchs, kleptocrats, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and those who would use anonymous shell companies to hide their illicit proceeds.

I won't quote the whole thing but it's a short and easy read.

This statement is a bit disturbing:

FinCEN will engage in additional rulemakings to: (1) establish rules for who may access beneficial ownership information, for what purposes, and what safeguards will be required to ensure that the information is secured and protected [...]

This provides another avenue for rogue members of institutions to leak private information to hurt people they don't like. Depending on the rules that ultimately come out, this avenue could be very wide, especially since there is often discretion over when to enforce the rules.

My revulsion to these rules goes beyond the erosion of privacy, though. It should be possible to be a citizen of a place without exposing your entire life to the mercy of its government. You can't avoid being at its physical mercy when you're within its territory, but you can leave now and then. The way financial rules work in the U.S., you have to report and pay taxes on all finances, even work and investments in other countries. You also have to pay taxes on income that doesn't affect anybody else (income you haven't spent). With these new rules, you might have to pay a reputational tax when wealth you were keeping private gets exposed. I would much prefer citizenship or investment in a place to be like membership in a club - you're judged by your behavior at club events, not by your life outside it.

It seems fine to me. If you want to enjoy the legal benefits of limited liability or operating as a corporation rather than a natural person the government wants to know to whom those benefits are actually accruing. Incorporation and limited liability are ultimately creations of the government. What's the counter argument? That there's a natural right to be able to operate a legally distinct entity in a way that shields you from liability of that entity's operations? I'm skeptical.

This reminds me of the “you didn’t build that” argument. Yes, government built roads but it doesn’t imply that because of that whatever the government wants the government can take.

Likewise, the grant of limited liability (premised on the idea that small investors wouldn’t want to expose their entire wealth to liability based on a small investment in Corp x) doesn’t mean it is reasonable for the government to do whatever it wants.

Ok, why is it unreasonable for the government to want to know what natural persons are benefiting from their grant of limited liability?

It is unreasonable because it doesn’t stop with them “just knowing.” It is sorta like guns. Step 1 is figure out who has them. Who can object to that? Step 2 is more malicious but once you give up Step 1 then Step 2 becomes easier to implement.

So it sounds like your objection is to some hypothetical Step 2, rather than this actual policy.

Yes because I understand that by doing Step 1 you make Step 2 much more likely to occur.

I don’t see much of a benefit to Step 1 but see a big downside to Step 2.

What is the objectionable Step 2 that this regulation makes much more likely to occur?

My concern is that government will use this info to freeze assets of the Goldstein of the day.

I much more prefer some guaranteed sort of right of participation in the financial system then the ability to be opaque. LLC goal is to limit the downside risk of starting and running a business. Not to hide assets.

Not saying it is. But the current system isn’t broken. Why fix it?

Recall the government claims FATCA would collect untold billions. To date, the only people who’ve collected material money from it are the Big 4.

This is probably similar but more sinister.

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