corporate taxation

Just brief thoughts here, at least for now.

Taxes are generally collected to achieve a societal purpose. To the extent that there are deductions, exemptions, credits, they serve to direct activity towards advancing some desired outcomes. To the extent that it's merely revenue, that revenue is subsequently spent towards achieving some desired outcomes. It's ultimately all social engineering.

And of course the original concept of corporations was an entity to perform some socially desirable outcome. (of course now, merely being profitable for investors is considered a sufficient socially desirable outcome.)

So why not a mammoth trade - we'll skip the corporate taxes so long as corporations perform/comply with socially desirable outcomes. In other words, go back to being what they were originally intended to be. (I'm reminded of Harry Browne's 'Great Libertarian Offer': Would you give up your favorite federal programs if it meant you'd never have to pay income tax again?)

Of course in order to be certain of success, we're back to issue #1: strip corporations of the constitutional rights of persons.

king kong vs godzilla

Reflexively, like many Americans, I'm not prone towards big government. However, the other leviathan in the room is the multinational conglomerate. Can tiny government - government you could easily slip into your wallet - handle these behemoths? Of course, given the way our current government handles them, one can only abandon all hope.

We do seem to be seeing a period of increased "personhood" and rights for the legal fiction that is corporations. This can only be bad. But....

The further & further this is pushed, the more obvious it become that this needs to be reversed. And when it is, they'd best go the whole way - the 14th Amendment does *not* include legal fictions. Period. The corporate mouthpieces spending their wads of "free speech" money will threaten catastrophe, but does anyone consider them unbiased bastions of truth?