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by doctorpangloss 2690 days ago
In my opinion, the philosophy of "specifics of how" has already been co-opted by tax dodgers. There is no way to have both enumerative, mathematical thinking and a sense of justice when it comes to taxes, because rich entities can always think of a tax dodge you didn't enumerate!

The reality is, no regular person is ever going to be on the wrong side of corporate taxes. You'll never be a huge corporation, you'll never be a huge corporate board, and since indexing, you'll never be a particularly aggrieved proxy shareholder.

Nobody really cares how "giant corporation pays the maximum tax it can bear" is arrived to, but that's what people want. It's different if it were small business owners or landlords. People also sometimes hate SBOs and landlords, but sometimes normal people are landlords and small business owners, so they can imagine being on the wrong side of justice there.

So like so many things technocratic thinking gets into, it's possible to be right and wrong at the same time. Right in the general case, in this imaginary case, where you just enumerate all the things, then you think hard about the things, and then you get the right answer. Wrong in the case that people in the real world actually inhabit, because you're both a likable person and you're not a giant corporation, so your philosophy is great to co-opt for what is basically a public-theft agenda.

3 comments

This isn't a legal forum.

HN is a legal forum, a tech forum, a history forum, a knitting forum, and any other kind of forum that inspires knowledgeable posts by subject matter experts on topics the community finds interesting.

I agree that lobbying is a problem, but it's still important to distinguish between "corruption of the tax code" vs "stuff that makes perfect sense and would probably exist even if no one ever tried to corrupt the tax code for personal benefit".

"Not paying taxes when you haven't made up past year's expenses" is the latter. It should not be cited as an example of the former.

Certainly none of us will "be" huge corporations, since corporations are not human beings. But many of us are part of huge corporations, both as shareholders and employees.
Well certainly, if a bunch of other employees of other corporations can live a just and equal life, and those employer-corporations pay more than 0% tax, you can imagine that you can be part of a corporation that merely pays more taxes?