[gopher1]

The government screws up the tax laws because they have been captured by the lobbying arms of large multi-national corporations, including Apple. It's no surprise then that those same corporations are the ones who get to pay 0% taxes while your average startup or mom & pop business has to pay the 35% corporate tax rate because they don't have a dozen tax lawyers on retainer to get them through the loopholes.

Why give the corporations who spend millions lobbying against tax reform a pass, just because they're "technically" lawful?

[crusso]

Why give the corporations who spend millions lobbying against tax reform a pass

Because unfair taxation is just a symptom of the core problem of too much trust in an institutionally corrupt government.

[gopher1]

So even though you acknowledge that the taxation system is unfair, and that it's due to a corrupt system. Despite the fact that this corrupt crony-capitalist system involves two actors, corporations and government, for some reason, you only blame the government?

Just because there may be a better system that exists out there in the abstract, where government is less centralized, and thus potentially less vulnerable to corruption, it seems like quite a bizarre leap of logic to exonerate one of the two main actors in the existing corrupt system.

Can you explain your logic please?

[crusso]

The corporation is doing what it's supposed to do within the system. It's supposed to look out for its own interests, obey the law, and make money for its shareholders.

The government is fundamentally broken. It's trusted as the law maker and the enforcer of the system, but fails in its main supposed benefit of trustworthiness.

Blaming the corporations for lobbying and planning their taxes is like kicking a kitten for drinking out of a bowl of milk that you left on the floor.

[waps]

I agree the point where purpose and incentives don't align isn't companies, it's government(s). However how can you fix that ? Democracy at least puts some limits on how far it can go, but doesn't seem to fix the problem.

[crusso]

That's because people aren't smart enough to elect their own high quality leaders. Then after that, they aren't smart enough to assess the quality of the leaders they elected.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a good example of why that is.

This is where capitalism is different from government. Money flows to success and tends to form feedback amplification. Smart people make more money than stupid ones. Smart people reward smart companies with their increased access to money.

The above is why I want to see government as small as reasonably possible. It should be limited to providing a basic framework, defense, maybe some basic research like for the Internet, Space exploration, etc. Only things that have a good track record of success. After that, though, the answers should typically come from the private sector where winners and losers get sorted out based more often upon merits than politics.