Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, gave up his US citizenship and moved to Singapore to avoid taxes and regulation like the populistly-punnily-named and onerous FATCA.
In response, our duly-elected and thus duly-outraged representatives proposed an Ex-Patriot act (I do so love puns in named legislation acronyms). This act is a dangerous moral and legal atrocity, not the least because it’s an ex-post-facto law, a bill of attainder, and an economically-destructive legislative abortion predicated on some leftist hacks’ inability to watch other people succeed on merit (or even luck) with any sort of positive outlook whatsoever. Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey need to put down Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto and get out once in a while so they quit wasting time trying to pass punitive laws.
Anyway. Those are the issues that Saverin is avoiding, but this isn’t about those issues. I applaud him for his role in creating wealth, prosperity, industries, etc., and in short living out a version of the American Dream that we don’t hear about often enough. I applaud him for taking a stand in exercising his liberty and being willing to walk away to do with his life as he pleases.
But here’s the problem: If he feels strong enough about these issues to do something about them, he ought to really do something about them. With the spotlight on him–and you don’t get much more of a spotlight than the IPO halo and US Congressmen introducing legislation with you especially in mind–Mr. Saverin has a tremendous but transitory platform to speak out and be heard about why he’s leaving.
He could talk about the tax climate. He could talk about the business climate, or lack thereof. He could talk about the incentives it creates and how those affect real peoples’ decisions.
He could point out that everyone’s kids have the opportunity to do what he did, and that the government is seeking to ruin that opportunity by destroying the incentives to create. He might add that the government will seek them out to punish them for their choices in making better lives for themselves. He could highlight the fact that the state is making a parody of the legal system, and that the things that made America great are slipping away with each Ex-Patriot act that’s passed, or even countenanced, in the name of public good and fairness.
Eduardo Saverin is not obligated to do or say these things. He wasn’t born in the US and owes nothing to it. Speaking out against the US Congressmen and their follies might be detrimental to his future career or life abroad. But if he wants to put his mouth where his money is, he’s the right man in the right place at the right time to make one more difference.
Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints 