[lbo-talk] Apple CEO rejects 'tax evasion' charges

[Eubulides]

On 5/21/2013 3:41 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> Max writes:
>
>> The crime is what's legal, and what's legal is
>> decided by the Congress.
>
> It's not clear to me that this is "legal" ... it's a loophole, because
> it takes advantage of a situation that was clearly spelled-out in the
> law -- if you make money, you pay tax on it, unless you pay tax to
> someone else, then we figure out what's fair -- and probably isn't
> exploitable by many.  But the sheer size of the dollars involved makes
> it worth it to try, even if your CEO gets put in front of a Senate
> Committee.
>
> The way you can tell how bad this smells is that they are 'warehousing'
> the profits offshore, hoping for a 'repatriation discount' -- the money
> is truely no good to them where it is, and they know it.  And they know
> that if they bring it back to the US, where it could at least be used to
> repurchase stock, or pay a dividend (not that either of those things is
> any good for the rest of us), they will get taxed on it.
>
> So they are in effect holding out for a better deal.
>
> Which doesn't make it legal.
>
> /jordan

================

Ah yes, the tired old law/crime binary and the *production* of legality 
out of....what, exactly?

If drones can be rhetorically laundered into legality, so can 
intellectual property in corn genomes, anarcho-capitalism or smoking 
weed in city parks in the presence of angst addled mothers with 3 year 
olds; who needs Derrida or Michael Huemer or A. John Simmons disputing 
the history of the foundations of the so-called duty to obey when 
corporate lawyers can make a toy of the discourse of law.

In the next 20-30 years I'd be willing to wager that the legal nihilism 
that has ensconsed itself in the former USSR will become ever more 
fashionable in the US. Just type legal nihilism russia into the google 
if you think I am kibbitzing.

Apple is just the almost end game on the corporate tax debate that took 
off with Obama's 1st term.

E.