Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'
businessinsider.comEstonia is such an interesting country. Story is that after the fall of communism they built, their entire economic model off of Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" book, having relatively little knowledge of any economics. This lead to some very interesting successes as a post-communist nation, especially considering Free to Choose was likely a banned book just a few years before. It sounds like they are going even further to the right and experimenting with some of the ideas from Anarcho-capitalism.
Bully for them. It's been working for them in the past, and it's nice to see a government that (at least seems) to have their act together trying out some weird and out there stuff.
Seems like it'll be a non-starter for most sane businesses given the insane reporting requirements.
we started to ask companies to give us more data. The reason is we wanted to get rid of fraud. Currently, all the companies in Estonia are declaring their B2B deals. If I’m a company and you’re a company and I buy something off you and it’s more than €1,000, we both have to declare it
How is this insane? It's just about keeping very clear logs of the transactions, right? I's not like in the US they don't know where my money transfers are coming from.
I guess it's the thousand Euro minimum? CTRs in the US are min $10,000, but that doesn't seem like an overwhelming hurdle when the transaction is already being recorded somewhere. Most people auto-generate this stuff anyway.
What business is it of a government what I spend money on?
It's their tax business.
It's unusual for a government to ask for recordings of individual transactions. Tax forms tend to ask for aggregate numbers on quarterly or yearly boundaries.
VAT administration tends to require transaction data.
For sales tax based systems, total aggregate turnover is enough; but to monitor VAT you'd need at least the aggregate volume grouped by all your B2B (VAT paying) customers and suppliers.
Yes, but you are required to retain much more detailed records and produce them upon request.
In unusual circumstances, like an audit perhaps. Many small businesses go their entire existence without sharing detail level transactions with the government.
So, when it's proposed, it's unusual, and is worthy of concern.
But if they call it Estoniachain companies will be tripping over each other to get on the bandwagon.
From https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/
e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union. The e-Resident smart ID card is not a physical identification or a travel document, and does not display a photo.
It's like they chose the second most misleading name they could think of (#1 being "e-citizen").
Imagine this becoming a thing. Where anyone could eventually become Estonia's resident with all the rights (and of course responsibilities) equal to the people actually living there. Once other nations would follow, then the borders would truly start to disappear because it wouldn't really matter where you are located. No more us and them, just people of the earth.
I know it's way too optimistic and this solution probably introduces just as many problems as it solves, but still, one is allowed to dream, right?
The cynical read on the same statement is "therefore other countries will stop respecting Estonian citizenship to maintain selectivity".
Shipping's been done under flags of convenience for years, but I suspect a lot of people will be deeply unwilling to walk that road for residence.
>"therefore other countries will stop respecting Estonian citizenship to maintain selectivity".
This has already happened in St Kitts[1][2]. They sold citezenship with very few non-financial requirements and now other nations have started screening travellers from there more aggressively, requiring visas, etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Kitts_and_Nevis_passport [2]http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/02/468953007/episo...
It reminds of the franchised countries ("Burbclaves") in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Well tax laws apply to you based on your tax residence and your citizenship so this has very limited benefits if you are already living in a western country. Plus due to all the anti money laundering rules you will have tough time opening a bank account remotely.
Agreed, but I think these are all solvable issues, someone just has to make the first attempt at solving them.
Actually, Estonia just passed a law which will allow remote bank account opening for all e-residents.
Passing a law and being able to implement it are 2 different things. If US decides to put pressure on banks they will comply.
Did businessinsider just run an article about what was an april fools joke?
http://arcticstartup.com/article/estonian-country-as-a-servi...
The article is about https://www.leapin.eu/ and https://e-estonia.com/
Those two sites don't seem like an april fools jokes.
Estonia's E-Residency program has gotten a few mentions on HN before, at one point they actually replied to some of the comments here on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10407604
And Kaspar Korjus, director of the E-Residency program, gave an AMA over on the Digital Nomad forum a few months ago:
https://nomadforum.io/t/i-m-kaspar-director-of-estonia-s-e-r...
Interesting, though physical residency must come in at some point, otherwise who pays taxes for the country you actually live in? But hey, if they start making good laws, I'd move there, as European it's very easy. But good laws means also lower taxes and a decent healthcare at decent prices.
> But good laws means ... decent healthcare at decent prices
I'd say it means decent healthcare, universally free of charge.
For cancer yes, but for a back pain? It's very hard to make universal healthcare because universal healthcare is a very subjective term. The only way to make healthcare universal is to work out serious insurance plans and then make sure that what's not covered is priced honestly.
> For cancer yes, but for a back pain
Yes. Someone shouldn't have to suffer in pain because they work a low paid job, or are unemployed.
> The only way to make healthcare universal is to work out serious insurance plans
It's not the only way. The other way is for our taxes to foot the bill, as we do in the UK with the NHS.
The NHS is far from perfect, with long waiting lists and varying levels of care depending on your location - but it works, and provides universal healthcare to the whole of the UK.
Well, I have never seen a healthcare system that works well for non-deadly issues like back pain and I have lived in Italy, Denmark and Germany. Also, at the end of the day somebody has to pay the bill, so either you pay with taxes or someone else has to pay yours with his taxes. Considering population is getting older, people that can pay your healthcare bills are going to be scarcer and scarcer. From a practical standpoint, what you want is unattainable. If we focus on the right stuff, instead, we can make sure that we are all better off, while right now public healthcare is a joke and people end up paying the same thing 2 times (first public healthcare insurance, second the private doctor).
IMO, the real goal should not simply be triage. 'Saving lives' is a huge part of why healthcare costs keep increasing. If you focus on quality of life things like late stage Cancer become lower priority's.
PS: If we spent 5% as much on back pain research as we have on Cancer there would likely be a range of viable treatments for most issues.
> Well, I have never seen a healthcare system that works well for non-deadly issues like back pain
As above, see the UK for a good example. TBH, I don't really know how healthcare works anywhere but the UK and US, but I had sort of assumed that other EU countries had a similar universal system to that of the UK.
> people that can pay your healthcare bills are going to be scarcer and scarcer
Your point has some validity, but tax revenues do not just come from personal income tax. Corporation tax, VAT, petroleum tax, council tax, insurance tax, air tax, road tax... christ, there is hardly anything that isn't taxed!
Given the long history of flags of convenience and purchasable citizenship in tax havens, something like this seems bound to be attempted eventually. If it takes off, it'll be curious to see how hard the pushback is.
Their doesn't need to be pushback. Every country that has an income tax taxes its residents, whether or not they are citizens.
Not too many in silicon valley can claim that:
... He adds: "I have been like a kid in a candy store. I have lots of investment money and full political support."