| I know that you are saying something that sounds true to you, so I am going to walk through the logic so that you can re-evaluate how much attention you are paying to critical thinking on these matters. What you're proposing is referred to as 'Social Darwinism'. In this application it is used in a pseudo-logical fashion to beg the question entirely and falsely imply the justification of a lemma. Your argument is as follows. "If you believe in (1) [natural selection applied to companies], then (2) [causal hypothesis: '1' leads to 'type'], meaning that (3) the [companies of type] we see now are the result of [natural selection applied to companies]." I hope it is apparent when you look carefully that the 'companies of type' we are seeing now would be simply the result of natural selection in any case, that there is no support for the causal hypothesis presented, and that the causal hypothesis is not in fact a logically necessary implication of the original lemma. The reason that this might feel meaningful, rather than be at first glance a tangle of errors, is that it involves the juncture between a hypothesis for which you feel you have evidence (and do!) with a core belief. Your hypothesis: "companies that do better at minimizing taxes are more likely to survive than those that don't." Your belief: "markets are efficient and the best economy arises when companies are allowed to compete without interference." The difficulty here is in the confusion of the two intellectual contexts. Natural selection is a descriptive theory about how what is came to be. Market libertarianism is a prescriptive theory about how what should be can come to be. They are not interrelated. Under condition of Soviet Market, natural selection will still exist. Even if regulatory capture helps a company survive instead of perish, libertarian theory still advocates against it. If you believe in natural selection applied to companies, then what we have here is the natural and almost predictable extinction event of those companies that over-optimized on minimizing taxes. However, the belief in "natural selection applied to companies" is essentially meaningless once you decouple it from action or advocacy; coupled to advocacy, it is incoherent. It inherits absolutely no scientific justification or intellectual rigour from biology. |