They've forgotten to add "... nor in the United States."
Reality check, according to the SEC filings Googles tax rate in the USA was 22%
The stories you read about Google "dodging tax" or paying only a few percent are looking at worldwide revenues. It's due to Americans going French all of a sudden and thinking that any money earned by any Google subsidiary anywhere in the world should be taxed by the IRS - even if that money was a Swiss Franc earned in Switzerland and then spent on Swiss salaries. Well the Swiss government gets to tax that, but the money never went anywhere near the USA, so the US doesn't get any. If you count all that money you can arrive at very low apparent tax rates, but it's just a fantasy.
ObDisclaimer: I work for Google and don't think there are any issues with the way the company pays tax.
I think a bigger question is how would you enforce such a tax on a company that has no assets in France. Does Facebook have any datacenters or offices here? If no, then
I'm really wondering if the current French government even cares about France being seen as a serious country. Taxes targeted at a handful of companies aren't going to resolve their budget deficit problems or even make a noticeable dent. This move strongly reminds me of their threats to nationalize ArcelorMittal if they closed a factory. The factory was closed and the threat was not carried through.
Come off it, North Korea and the USA are nothing alike. North Korea is 1984 writ large, it's as if they thought Orwell wrote a textbook instead of dystopian fiction. Even in its worst moments the US is light years from that.
I think what you're trying to say is that there are some small seeds of resemblance in certain things, in particular the way Americans are taught from birth to believe the USA is the greatest country in the world, that other countries just aren't as good, that they're lucky to be born there, and so on, as opposed to being taught that the USA is merely a good country, much like many other countries except larger. And in that case yes, there is a slight similarity.
But it's only very slight. For one, many Americans are not brought up this way. For another, any who are can easily learn about the outside world, including by visiting it. Obvious exceptions: Cuba, Iran, any other country the administration currently has a hate-on for. And that's bad, but it's a blacklist of destinations not a whitelist. Anyone there who wants to understand the truth of the world can.
For all its faults, the US has a strong economy, lacks a cult of personality (you might say the same cultish mentality exists around the constitution though), and is just generally better than North Korea in every conceivable way. NK is useful because it shows what can exist at the bottom of the slippery slope towards totalitarianism. Lots of people understand that which is why they get up in arms every time there's some new violation of civil rights.
By the way, I'm a Brit.
However, the expansion curve was designed by somebody with utterly no understanding of economics, and the built-in deflation inherent that would come with expansion in BitCoin use guarantees they'll never become widespread for mainstream transactions because of widespread volatility in the exchange rate vs. stuff you actually want to buy.
This argument is both very common and wrong. So I'd like to address it here.
Firstly, let's put aside the appeal to authority. Conventional economic theory/monetary policy has led to an absolute clusterfuck - a worldwide recession that shows no signs of ending any time soon. If the current understanding of economics leads to this, then it's time to question that understanding from bottom to top.
Secondly, let's also set to one side the arguments that are contradicted by reality. Empirical evidence shows that deflation does not lead to depression. If the Minneapolis Feds study doesn't convince you, look at Bitcoin itself. Despite a dramatic increase in the value of the currency, the Bitcoin economy has grown equally dramatically. BitPay went from 1000 to 2000 merchants in the space of only a few months, and that's only a small subset of Bitcoin-accepting entities. So the system is, again, an existence proof that this common belief is mistaken. Likewise, Bitcoin has been remarkably non-volatile this year. It spent almost all of 2012 at one of two price points: $5 per coin in the first part of the year and somewhere between $10 and $13 per coin in the latter part. Hardly different to the volatility you'd expect from any other currency.
Thirdly, let's address the idea that credit is the lifeblood of the economy. Any economist will tell you that growth comes from innovation. Improvements in productivity, in technology, reductions in the cost of doing business. Wealth - the things we have around us, the quality of our food, our healthcare, the stability of our society
I don't get it. What do you have against Bitcoin? Has it killed your dog or something?
Your post is a stream of non-sequiturs. Yes, the primary exchange was hacked
Many US banks have unbelievably woeful security that results in accounts being routinely emptied. Consumer accounts are insured by the government but business and organizational accounts aren't, yet many of them are protected by nothing more than a password or secret question/answer. That's absurd. Now nothing stops you under-protecting your Bitcoins, but at least you can upgrade to more security if you want. You're not at the mercy of your local bank.
What on earth makes you think that starting a "virtual business is more trivial than a physical business"? Did you step out of a timewarp from the 70s? Do you think competing with Amazon is inherently easier than competing with your local supermarket? Exchanges, as you note, rely heavily on their users trust in their security (as do all financial institutions). That's what stops them "simply reforming under a new identity". They'd be starting from zero and have no advantage over anyone else. And FYI financial regulations do apply to Bitcoin exchanges as they would any other online currency exchange. That's one reason the big ones all demand government issued ID in the same way a bank would.
Feel free to laugh at people who are using a next-generation financial system. It's been many years and Bitcoin is still around and doing fine, so I doubt anyone will care.
That isn't what backing means. Every single reply to my post has the same issue. Backing does not mean "the issuing authority has assets they can sell" and it doesn't mean "the issuing authority can force me to use their tokens through the barrel of a gun".
To say a currency is backed by something has a very specific meaning, which is that there is an asset literally "behind" the currency. The currency itself is merely a proxy for the backing material, one can be exchanged for the other at a specific rate. The gold standard meant you could, at least in theory, go to a bank or the government, hand in some currency and walk out with gold bars.
So given this clear definition it's meaningless to say a currency is backed by "the authority to tax". That authority might incentivize a large population to obtain these tokens and thus give them some value - but that isn't backing. It's taxation. It's also wrong to say a currency is backed by the ability to sell something like land - OK, so the government sells some land it owns. What does it sell that land for? Oh, right, it sells the land for dollars. So if I lose confidence in the dollar and want to hand them in, in return for the asset that backs them, the government selling land and giving me back more dollars doesn't help. I'd need the actual land itself and there'd need to be an actual somewhat fixed exchange rate between dollars and land. But there isn't.
If you want to argue that dollars have value because the US government taxes its citizens in that way, go right ahead. That argument doesn't lead to "Bitcoins are worthless because no government taxes in them" though. Bitcoins obviously aren't worthless because they started out having no value when they were first created, and obtained value over time as people learned about them. The system is an existence proof that you'd be wrong.
Proving Bitcoins have value is trivial - there are exchanges where they are traded against other currencies for non-trivial prices, so they clearly have value. What more proof could you demand?
Yes, you can charge back with credit cards. This is great for the credit card companies who then lose the incentive to make their systems more secure, because merchants (ie, the poker companies) lose the money. With Bitcoin you cannot, so the deck is metaphorically stacked in favor of the merchant vs the punter. It's a little better than the reverse because most merchants at least have reputations they want to protect and aren't going anywhere, unlike buyers who can disappear in an instant. But Bitcoin does have ways to offer buyer protection - it's discussed in the very first page of the white paper describing the systems design. The protocol allows for dispute mediators who can decide who gets the money (buyer or seller) but who cannot steal the money themselves.
No control? That's an interesting way to look at it. Bitcoin is controlled by the consensus system that underlies it, if you decide you want to violate the rules then you are split off automatically into a parallel universe where whatever you do won't be recognized by your trading partners. That is a much stronger form of control than traditional currencies have. To change the rules requires the economic majority to upgrade (and thus force everyone else to upgrade with them, so trade can continue). It's pretty democratic, in that sense.
Contrast this to, eg, the US dollar, where control has been deliberately passed to a quasi-private branch of government known as the central bank. Its unelected leader pulls the levers of monetary policy in an attempt to plan the economy.
So both types of currency are controlled, just in different ways.
Don't fall too far down the Austrian School hole, though. The past 6 years have proven that modern Keynesian economic models are a very good description of how the global economy actually responded to the recent massive financial problems.
No it hasn't. It's been the exact opposite. Recent years have pretty much discredited the whole idea of Keynesian monetary policy, namely government spending during recessions and government hoarding of surpluses during booms. Good in theory, completely worthless in practice because, shock, governments don't ever do it.
Let's review a few facts. The first fact is that according to Keynesian teaching, current US monetary policy should result in massive stimulation of the economy - borrowing is as cheap as the Fed can make it. According to the theory, right now the economy should be borderline overheating the juice has been turned up so high. Actually it is sputtering along apparently indifferent to the Fed.
The second fact is that there's a good explanation for this which hasn't previously been accounted for in the mainstream teaching. Namely, that Fed policy hasn't juiced the economy because people don't want to borrow, no matter how cheap it is. That isn't something they anticipated, so QE1 was largely DOA. It enriched the banks who now got a great wheeze in the form of being paid interest on reserves given to them for free, but otherwise was just pushing on string. QE3/4 have thus resorted to outright monetization of the debt, the avoidance of which was one of the primary arguments for central bank independence. Oh well.
Now you point to BLS data as if to say, look ma, no inflation! But I feel that your post is misleading for three reasons. The first is that bill_mcgonigle didn't say "inflation should be higher than it is given current policy", so you are arguing a strawman. The second reason it's misleading is you're quoting a compound rate and neglecting to mention that. 2% inflation in 2010 is a much larger increase in prices than a 2% inflation in 1985. Every year, if prices rose by the same fixed amount, the quoted inflation rate would go down because it'd be a fixed increase over an ever larger base price. That isn't happening. The third reason is that it's only very recently the USG adopted policies that would be expected to increase inflation. QE1 had little effect, QE2 was "operation twist" which wasn't creating new money, actual creation of money that will enter the economy is a relatively recent thing.
There's a third problem I have with your post about the Austrian School. You bring it up right after talking about inflation. The Austrian School teaches common sense on inflation - if you print money, inflation is the result. This isn't some radical crazy philosophy. It's both obvious and supported by many examples throughout history (Edicts of Diocletian and Germany in the first part of the 20th century spring to mind). The crazy, radical philosophy is that endless money printing (that works, so not QE1) will NOT affect inflation. Even the Fed don't believe that which is why their current policy of open ended bond buying is supposed to end if/when inflation goes over a certain level. They know that's the expected end result and they also know inflation is bad.
Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.