Except they don't. They create corporations to do it for them.
As long as creating a legal fiction is a mere matter of having someone else do paperwork, you either need to extract tax from legal fictions, or kiss a big chunk of taxable activity goodbye.
I don't think that's accurate if we're talking about large publicly listed companies, the only way for shareholders to spend the money on themselves is to take it out via dividends or sell the stock for a capital gain.
To pay back the loan they need to sell the stock which is a capital gains event.
The two main tax avoidance strategies would be people running and retiring overseas just before selling, or never selling and waiting for the cost basis to be reset upon their death.
The best way to "tax" the rich is to make them spend all their money. The more the rich consume, the more the less rich benefit. It's turtles all the way down after that.
So please order that custom yacht now, all you HN unicorns.
It only redistributes work toward what rich people want.
Investing into something actually useful would be much better.
Scenario A: yacht is bought - economy is redirected toward luxurious yacht building, people get paid to work on building a yacht
Scenario B: investment into housing - economy is redirected toward house building, people get paid to build houses
scenario A can be a good one only when this people would be unemployed and seeking a work otherwise. Or if you think that building luxurious yachts is more important than alternatives.
What if the point of taxes is not simply to redirect and redistribute funding, but also to reduce economic activity and, by extension, emissions and inflation?
> The best way to "tax" the rich is to make them spend all their money.
What a catastrophic idea. Do you want economy tuned to the tastes of the vain, wasteful, and capricious? In such economy there is no car, real estate, mobile phone, or clothes for you.