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Because corporations thrive purely on the society they are making money from. No company lives in a vacuum. However great and driven Elon Musk might be, he wou
by axlee 10y ago
Because corporations thrive purely on the society they are making money from. No company lives in a vacuum.
However great and driven Elon Musk might be, he would never have made a single cent if he had started Paypal in Somalia. And what differentiates a market in Somalia from another market like, let's say, France?
Let's take this further. Zuckerberg makes a lot of money in France solely thanks to the technological infrastructure built by the society living there. Why would the French public let Facebook exploit this environment for his personal profit, while not paying its fair share to maintain the very same socio-economic environment that allows it to make money in the first place (and that everybody else is contributing towards)? Anyone would describe this behavior as parasitism.
Let's imagine you spend ten years building a shoe factory. After ten years, a stranger comes in and starts to use your factory at night to make shoes and sell them for his profit. Are you going to let him use your factory for free?
Even if your answer to this is "Well maybe there shouldn't be any public infrastructure in the first place", it simply shifts the problem somewhere else: if a private company would be managing the infrastructure, rest assured they would also ask for usage costs...which is precisely like a tax. A feodal tax.
- oh_sigh 10y agoIs your argument that owners would just not take any money out of the company so as to not pay the taxes? In OPs example the company would still be taxed but just at different times
- axlee 10y agoI don't see how. Most owners are not taxable residents of the country where companies operates. If I'm personally taxable in the Bahamas, but I make all my capital profits from a company operating in a country with no corporate taxes, that country will never ever see a single tax cent from me, despite me leveraging their infrastructure and society for profit (for virtually free). I would directly profit from their roads, their transportation, their education, their Internet, their police, their laws, their justice, while never contributing to it.
- jfoster 10y ago> Even if your answer to this is "Well maybe there shouldn't be any public infrastructure in the first place", it simply shifts the problem somewhere else: if a private company would be managing the infrastructure, rest assured they would also ask for usage costs.. I wouldn't say there shouldn't be public infrastructure. For the last part, though, mightn't Facebook consider charging the company managing infrastructure for the ability of their customers to access Facebook? I think people would be a lot less likely to subscribe to an ISP that didn't facilitate access to Facebook.