Ok, but I don't fully agree with the rich people moving away being such a bad thing (in many cases its positive because there will be less leeches as these guys who leave are the ones most likely to be tax avoiding anyway- black and white terms) . Because lets face it the only reason people leave for example Depardieu from France is because they are selfish and don't want to be paying their fair share back to society.
Everybody is selfish, the rich people that stay probably less than the rest of humanity, considering they could move and keep more anyway. Do you know what is the percentage of Depardieu's annual income that would go to the French state? Especially in risky and sporadic businesses like culture (you can have one very good year then a lot of very bad years), the French tax system is extremely penalizing because it's difficult to smooth out a large surge in income. As a result you get a lot more money taken from you than most people earning as much as you do, just because they earn the same every month and you don't.
They consciously or subconsciously forget that without the state they would never have got their money in the first place.
And the state depends on tax. People like Depardieu pay huge amounts in taxes that would seem unfair if you had to pay the same fraction. Deciding what the part of the state in the economy has to be is a very complicated matter. Even things like education can be entirely private.
For example apple getting all of its hardware technology from the US military for its Iphone (see Mariana Mazzucato http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/)
That's completely irrelevant, furthermore Apple didn't receive US military tech in a giftbox. It's a not a mystery that businesses don't necessarily like spending much in research and there are plenty of reasons for that. Research is one of the areas where the state
can have a good effect and be effective at steering the economy a little bit. Of course all those things introduce more bureaucratic weight if done badly, and Belgium is notorious for having a terrible research investment program compared to say, the research tax breaks in the UK merely because the UK system is simple and effortless.
And yep I agree with the tax haven comment, time to make a UN taskforce to confiscate all known tax dodgers with home addresses in Monaco, Cayman Islands, Bahamas etc and then put that money to pay off Greece's debts and some other nations so we can stimulate more confidence in the markets or whatever.
That would be unfair and arbitrary. That money just needs to be identified and taxed accordingly. More importantly, international tax evasion schemes for businesses need to be dealt with, and you don't even have to go that far to find those.
Like I said plenty of money out there to fix a whole ton of issues such as unemployment. Just got to question the priorities of the powers that be ^^
Sure, it takes a lot of political courage to do the things that really matter. The problem is that the voters are quite ignorant as to what it is that should be done to fix their problems.