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I think a big fraction (the majority) of people who hold the belief that private market is more efficient are also saying things like "you should not do X or the private companies will just go in another country where they don't impose X", with X being usually a thing beneficial for the community/society (collecting fair tax, protecting the employees, protecting the environment, redistributing the money towards basic infrastructure where people cannot afford them, making sure the market is fair, ...). Trying to avoid any of those X is usually morally questionable (and on top of that there is the fact that they will not hesitate to turn their back to the country that provided the environment were they were able to be successful). So, a lot of these people who hold this belief are agreeing (not explicitly, they just know it's true but don't want to say it out loud) that rich people are doing what is better for them, not what is better for the society. Which is why people view negatively rich people who profit from government tax incentive. I think you summarize my understanding on why using tax incentives are seen as a negative trait with the sentence > We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others If you have to encourage behaviors that are good for the society and discourage behaviors that are bad for the society, it means that some people, without these incentives, will prefer to do the "bad" behaviors rather than the "good" behaviors. I understand that people will not like these people. Again, tax incentives are totally useless if the rich people are people with normal moral who will naturally try to do the correct thing. The government, not you, is already choosing the domain where it applies tax incentives. So the argument that you don't want to give tax because you think you will do a better job at choosing the project than the government does not hold: if you are doing something where the government provides a tax incentive, you are doing something that the government wanted to be done. And the government is also more than happy to get good advice and support on such projects, but again, there, those generous rich people are not doing anything despite their nice posture. If indeed they don't trust the government to do "good things", it's funny that they don't do them themselves and instead jump on the first tax incentive opportunity. Posture is cheap, but when it comes to invest extra, without government help, for something that is "good", there is no one remaining from the group of the people who explains that a government collecting tax is not a good way to have nice things done. |