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Notes -
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".
I won't quote the whole thing but it's a short and easy read.
This statement is a bit disturbing:
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.
Step 1. Make it virtually impossible to operate a business without a limited-liability corporate structure
How is it virtually impossible to operate a business without a limited liability corporate structure? Many businesses in the United States are sole proprietorships which do not have limited liability.
For one, all your competitors are limited-liability.
"Many" is a weasel-word here. "Many" could be 5 businesses in the whole country. While there are some some sole proprietorships, you would be a fool to own one. Serious businesses are not run that way. Sole proprietorships are for hobbyists and the naive.
In the time it took you to write this comment you could have looked it up and found that most businesses in the US are sole proprietorships.
I did look it up and that information tells you nothing. Most of these "businesses" are a single person. How many have 10 employees? How many have 100?
So you knew it wasn't five businesses in the whole country?
Businesses that aren’t selling Etsy art are very likely to be incorporated via a single member LLC (unless the owner is a complete idiot).
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