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Corporations are just bundles of stuff that people own. They have legal personhood as a convenient legal fiction because it would be obnoxious if all of the own

Corporations are just bundles of stuff that people own. They have legal personhood as a convenient legal fiction because it would be obnoxious if all of the owners had to get together to sign things, and they have rights because people don't lose any of their individual rights just because they happened to form a corporation together. But at the end of the day, bundles of stuff. Economists seem to be broadly in agreement that tax systems would work better if corporations didn't pay income tax.

dnautics 7y ago
What about the inverse. What if individuals didn't pay an income tax but corporations did, kind of as a "user fee" for the privilege of having limited liability.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  Mostly because corporations are pretty different from people. They can own each other, buy and sell each other, split in two or be combined, etc. And they they can deduct business expenses in ways that people can’t deduct living expenses, because we rationally recognize that corporations mostly have lower profit margins than the tax bill would be on total revenue (and some always will at any tax level).
james1071 7y ago
Maybe I am wrong on this, but I doubt that you have studied economics or have any idea what economists think. The people that you are talking about are effectively lobbyists - policy entrepreneurs is the phrase, who appear in the media advocating for policies that benefit their clients.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  Feels like an aggressive response to what I said. Feel free to look it up, the statement is noncontroversial. There are regularly conducted surveys of the field that include questions on this topic.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Yeah, this "corporate personhood" issue is so dumb. All it is is that the legal system decided it would make sense to apply the same laws in some areas to both companies and humans, rather than design completely separate frameworks for each case. In HN terms: This is code reuse/refactoring.

dnautics 7y ago

What about the inverse. What if individuals didn't pay an income tax but corporations did, kind of as a "user fee" for the privilege of having limited liability.

dodobirdlord 7y ago
Mostly because corporations are pretty different from people. They can own each other, buy and sell each other, split in two or be combined, etc. And they they can deduct business expenses in ways that people can’t deduct living expenses, because we rationally recognize that corporations mostly have lower profit margins than the tax bill would be on total revenue (and some always will at any tax level).

james1071 7y ago

Maybe I am wrong on this, but I doubt that you have studied economics or have any idea what economists think. The people that you are talking about are effectively lobbyists - policy entrepreneurs is the phrase, who appear in the media advocating for policies that benefit their clients.

dodobirdlord 7y ago
Feels like an aggressive response to what I said. Feel free to look it up, the statement is noncontroversial. There are regularly conducted surveys of the field that include questions on this topic.

BurningFrog 7y ago

Yeah, this "corporate personhood" issue is so dumb. All it is is that the legal system decided it would make sense to apply the same laws in some areas to both companies and humans, rather than design completely separate frameworks for each case. In HN terms: This is code reuse/refactoring.