[cturner]

    Makes your furniture cheaper... and your taxes higher.

You can't produce evidence to support that. An entirely reasonable idea: the increased economic activity generated by Ikea success and happy, employed staff and nice affordable furniture more than offsets the tax revenue that would have been collected.

The flexibility that success stories have to move around and chase better taxation rates makes taxation lower for the rest of us. The barbarians in the capital know that if they make conditions too unnice, the successful people will up and leave. The rest of us are free-loaders on the desire of countries to attract those groups.

If Sweden or Europe changed things to crack down on Ikea, they could move plenty of their operation to Singapore.

    You'll have better luck with fair, broadly-based taxes

By fair, do you mean something like the same rule for everyone? Anything broader than that will move into the sort of cajoling you dislike.

[gaius]

An entirely reasonable idea: the increased economic activity generated by Ikea success

But it doesn't work like that. We, as a society, don't let individuals or organizations decide what's best. We vote in a government who (in theory) decide the rules that apply to everyone, then they tax and spend accordingly.

I know it doesn't work like that, which is why you get situations like this (or like Bono campaigning for higher government spending, while squirreling his own money away where it can't be taxed). Hell, I reckon that a better use of my taxes would be supporting the luxury goods industry which is suffering during the recession, but I don't get to cancel my income tax and spend it on champagne and caviar instead...