But that is no excuse to get rid of government. The focus should be to rid government of vested interests.

His whole post is to dispute that socialism is a disease. You seem to have missed the point.

You and I are talking about different things. The issue with PepsiCo is not based on VAT, but corporation tax on the profits. The VAT still has to be charged (and remains in the UK) as the seller of the product is the supermarket or corner store.

Actually the EU is a very very loose political union that was developed after the economic framework was developed - originally the European Economic Community which you may know as the "Common Market". The EU is the result of the economic cooperation - it was determined that there needs to be some political structure in order to co-ordinate the common market. What you are seeing in the past 5 years the result of too much economic integration without the requisite fiscal integration (which is highly political). So you have 2 choices -

Roll back economic integration
Speed up political integration (especially on the fiscal side)

So if you roll back economic integration, you have to suffer the economic consequences, and if you speed up political integration, you have to suffer the political consequences. This is the dilemma and obviously most of Europe has already decided that in order to see it through there needs to be more fiscal integration, especially in the Eurozone. This doesn't exclude the possibility that some countries would roll back economic integration, however, they seem to be holding on (eg. Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal, etc. are still in the Eurozone).

Maybe because it violate the basic tenants fair play? There is a reason for tax and a large part of it is to pay for the upkeep of the physical *and* social infrastructure in a country. What you are advocating is that we should let differences between the tax regimes be taken care of solely by market forces, and by extension the rapid downsizing of the state in a race to the bottom.

I guess if you sold it *that* way, it doesn't look half as attractive does it?

But it isn't fair to a UK based company making crisps locally to be sold in the UK. Not everybody can afford to set up a corporate office in Switzerland or Luxembourg to avoid tax.

Under EU tax rules, if the supplier is in a different EU country than the customer, and both are VAT registered in their respective countries, then the supplier does not pay or claim for VAT. This is called the reverse charge.

It was clearly explained in my post. I don't know how you missed that.

The only reason they would pay VAT would be if Google's Irish subsidiary registered for VAT in the UK as well as in Ireland. But why would you want to do that when you could keep all that revenue away from HMRC by not registering for VAT in the UK?

For an example is how prevalent this practice is, look at how Pepsico structure it's operations in the UK. They sells crisps (ie. potato chips) in the UK under the Walkers brand. There was an article no long ago in one of the major newspapers that described how they are able to effective transfer all the profits away from the UK part of the business to avoid paying tax. They did it by assigning all the potatoes that goes into the making of the crisps to be owned under the Swiss subsidiary. These are processed and made into crisps in the UK owned plants, which makes almost no profit in its operations. The finished product, still owned by the Swiss subsidiary is sold, and all the profits make are accounted for under the Swiss operation.

The problem with is that in the EU, we have the free movement of goods through economic union, but there is not overriding political union to plug the loop holes. This needs to be addressed somehow, or otherwise, we are just subsidising Switzerland, Luxembourg and Ireland through tax loopholes.

Talking about just the sales tax angle, that's exactly the same issue faced in British Columbia with PST due to it being a cascading tax. The major businesses are all vertically integrated to avoid paying PST on supplies again and again. This was eventually replaced by the HST, which is a tax combining the federal GST with the provincial PST, but is a value-added tax as opposed to a cascading tax.

Interestingly enough, the voters rejected the fairer HST last year and opted to return to the PST because people were complaining that more things are being taxed to make up for the shortfall when the province moved from PST to HST a few years ago.

Which probably Google isn't paying either. This is because most people buying services from Google are VAT registered businesses, and the entity processing the sale is based in Ireland. Under EU VAT rules, the place of supply is based in the UK (where the customer is located), so the whole transaction is under the reverse charge and hence no VAT is charged either in the UK or in Ireland.

Of course, the idea is that the VAT is charged when the business sells the product to the end-user, which is probably in the UK, but for advertising Google isn't being taxed on any of that.

Under English law, the defendant has the burden of proof to show that his or her statement is not defamatory. So what the GP said is absolutely correct. However, it will be very costly for the defendant to do so under the current legal system, and is not practical to do so unless you have serious money on your side.

So in theory the legal system is designed to prevent libellous statements by putting the burden of proof on the defendant, however in practice, English libel laws are often used to silence critics of the rich and powerful.

It's a bit more complicated than that with England and Wales. Wales is effectively governed by English law after the final conquest of Wales back in the 16th century. England and Wales is effectively one jurisdiction, under the law courts of England and Wales. However, with devolution and the Welsh assembly, Wales can pass its own laws in certain areas, but the enforcement of which is still under the joint jurisdiction.

Even MS Office doesn't open MS Office files properly. Try opening a DOC file with Word 2007, save it in DOCX, import it it using the filter in Word 2003 and save it back in DOC format again. Yes, things break if you have a moderately complex document. Maybe not as obvious as if you imported it into OOO and then back to DOC, but it's not seamless.

The problem is that the DOC format sucks. The DOCX format sucks even more. That "standard" was designed so that there would never be any real interoperability between "implementations" unless it was the MS implementation.

So, you mean in other words, the don't know any better?

Seriously, MS Word is the Ford Focus of "productivity software". Now imagine businesses, instead of using a proper Caterpillar truck, hauls earth from the strip mine with convertible Ford Focuses instead. That's basically what's happening in offices across the globe right now.