Twitteretter

The Biden administration has started an effort to introduce a minimum corporation tax level globally, which they are aiming to set at 21%. The plan also contemplates ensuring tax is paid where profit is generated, precluding the escape to more benign tax climates. These are fantastic news, although we need to be wary of the many obstacles this initiative will still face, if it is ever to become a reality. As corporate profits increase and more people struggle as a result of inequality, fair corporate taxation and a degree of social redistribution of their profits is critical to maintain a precarious social balance. From my perch, the most important aspect of this development is the recognition that tax evasion and inequality are problems that can only be addressed globally, as corporations think and function globally. Once we perceive global problems in global rather than national terms, we may even have a chance to fix them! I am definitely on Team Biden on this one Length: 982 charac...

This is a general issue, although the specific events that elicit this post today are the attempt by Amazon workers in Alabama to unionise, strongly resisted by the company, which has even, in a departure from typical corporate behaviour, started to attack politicians such as Sanders and Warren on social media. This argument should not even be happening, but it is, a result of the successful crashing of the Unions by Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 80s. We are coming to the point, as a society, where we have to ask ourselves the question: Do companies exist to serve people, or do people exist to serve companies? The answer is urgent, unbelievable as this may sound. It is high time we return businesses to their place, the service of society at large and of its individual citizens. Otherwise, we risk seeing companies become proxies for arrogant, autocratic CEOs to wield their power on their fellow human beings, well beyond their remit of delivering books or connecting friends Length: 98...

Monopoly. When you are a child, this is a board game, in which you greedily strive to become a property tycoon, accumulate land and build houses and hotels on it, to crash your opponents by taking all their money, ultimately winning the game. When nobody secures dominance, the game goes on forever, as monies you take when others land on your property, you return when you land on theirs, so nobody’s wealth runs out. This is a very apt analogy for how monopolies work. Once you establish one, as Peter Thiel, the mega successful Silicon Valley investor tells us, you guarantee maximum profits by negating the possibility of competition. One winner and every one else losing is fun in a board game but, when the game is real life and the board is society, this is a problem, from many perspectives. We are seeing this with the tech giants today, Google, Amazon and Facebook, behemoths which own their markets, increasing inequality and stifling entrepreneurship. Time to change the rules of the game...

Twitteretter keeps progressing, according to my initial aims. I still have over 700 entries to write over two more years. This gives me the luxury to be somewhat unselective as to what I cover, as I have plenty of chance to cover everything I may be, or become, interested in. I am currently in what an economist would call a situation of abundance. However, this will change, as I suddenly realised today, when weighing four article ideas knowing full well I do not have to choose between them. What choice will I make when 1,000 entries are behind me and I can only write one more? When I reach maximum scarcity? I’ve always thought success and happiness are predicated on having choices, on engineering situations in which, when confronted with a difficult choice, you have the resources to not choose, to take both desired avenues, because you have the time, the money or the energy needed to do so. One thing I know for sure, that difficult moment will not make me start Twitteretter Edition Two...