Regarding the tax avoidance, I notice Suckerberg and Thiel and their sub-Randian tax free fruitopian ideas. Perhaps we should let them avoid tax, and at the same time deny them the capital and property protecting powers that the state was designed for. No more copyright, patents, no access to courts at all. No criminal protection either, from hackers/DDOSers et al. At the same time if they want to use our state educated employees they can pay a special transfer fee to buy them of the state school system. There has developed a cult of 'I did this whole thing myself', which massively downplays the role society has in allowing the formation of a corporation and providing the protection of property and capital. None of which is free, and why should the regular Joe payroll tax payer pick up the tab?

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac... [1]http://www.techradar.com/news/new-standards-for-the-indian-o...

edit: I feel like I should have expressly mentioned limited-liability. Imagine if the investors in a private equity outfit hat to pick up the tab of all of the start-ups that go bankrupt? That is libertarian

Taxes are proportional to earnings, but the amount of money you cost the government is not. Why should you start paying more just because you were successful?

If you actually wanted to implement "Suckerburg" and Thiel's "fruitopian" ideas, you should charge them a reasonable price based on the services they use, rather than based on how much money they earn.

I suspect they pay substantially more taxes than most of us do.

No proportional amounts of money

>Taxes are proportional to earnings, but the amount of money you cost the government is not

You don't think Google places rather more demand on the government than me? For instance I go to court occasionally to collect debts from customers. These are single 10 minute sessions before a judge. Compare this to Oracle Vs Google.

Or we have a fleet of 11 delivery vehicles using the highways that society created, Amazon has hundreds.

We have 100 employees that the state brought up, kept healthy (Yeah I know this is different in the US), educated and delivered to us at 16 ready to work. Google has 74k employees, Amazon has 566k.

Then there is regulation, I am not in a position to abuse the market, these guys are and should pay for the arbitration and oversight that this needs.

> charge them a reasonable price based on the services they use

Yes, a reasonable price, hundreds of millions of dollars every year in every territory where they operate.

Turning the question back on you, how would you measure the cost to the government? Per patent, per line of copyrighted material you are protecting? Per mile driven, per minute the regulator had to spend on them? Per employee they take on? Per police call perhaps? Per crime they were a victim of? Per minute the politicians had to spend on them? Per the amount of debt that the government is allowing them to run up, whilst offering limited liability?

That sounds like a pretty expensive return to fill out?

For me personally, it's quite clear that in years where I make more money and therefore pay more taxes, I haven't cost the government any more.

The system is unfair, but better than any other system then?

> punishing success

Is an emotive term, and nonsense. How is it a punishment? I know Zuckerberg looks like he can't afford a suit, but he doesn't seem to be particularly oppressed by the state. In fact he seems to have scrimped and saved $70bn despite the pillaging. How about a different term, 'sharing success with the society that helped create it'?

> For me personally, it's quite clear that in years where I make more money and therefore pay more taxes, I haven't cost the government any more.

And your business operations come at no cost to society, and don't use any of the benefits society created? Could it be the inverse is true, in the years where you were less profitable the government reduced your tax burden below your actual cost to nurture and encourage your enterprise? And later you earned more and paid something back towards it?

So taking your point to extreme - should my “taxes” (on what?) be the highest in my 70s?

This suggests we should not tax at all. This suggests we should simply invent money as-needed. Destroy it when not-needed.

Some call that "Marxism".

"Efficiency: Compliance costs to business and administration costs for governments should be minimised as far as possible."

That is a quote from

OECD (2014), "Fundamental principles of taxation", in Addressing the Tax Challenges of the Digital Economy, OECD Publishing, Paris.

This seems like a fair criticism of the post above where something other than a progressive income/profit tax was being suggested.

RE: Marxism

I don't really think you have taken the time to find out who the OECD are. The OECD are the "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development". Their role is to spread the market economy, and in particular work on double taxation treaties between countries. The antithesis of Marxism.

> This suggests we should simply invent money as-needed. Destroy it when not-needed.

This is the kind of misunderstanding you get when you model national finance like a household budget. Money is created and destroyed constantly by governments, and even more so by banks. When banks lend money it comes from nowhere. Governments run deficits for years, where they create money that didn't exist before.Taxation is exactly the destruction of money. This is not Marxism, it is economics.

You may not have known this, but those people aren't owned by the state. They can't be sold. Or are you advocating for something else...? Maybe you think it's better than libertarianism?

But mostly, I am curious about what you actually mean about buying students. I'm not being obtuse, I don't understand what you meant because I'm sure you're not really advocating what it sounds like.

Now, how a split would affect the people involved, that's another story. But if you weight the number of people in those companies, versus the number of people they affect worldwide, well… the moral weight of the company is a rounding error. The only thing that really counts is how stuff like a split would affect the rest of the world. And if it means putting those four companies out of business, well, tough luck. The greater good must prevail. And even then, there are ways to compensate for the subsequent spike in unemployment.

Arbitrarily breaking the law, that is, limiting the so-called "rights" of people, is considered bad, that very law prohibits it. You cannot just go and prevent somebody from doing a thing not prohibited by the law, such as carrying an iPhone, because suddenly you realize that you need to grab the iPhone and split it to pieces to make the world as a whole a better place.

Same applies to other properties, like companies. Unless owners of these are breaking the law, you can't grab and split their companies, because you consider it a greater good.

Of course, there were numerous examples when people ignored law and did arbitrary things, because "revolutionary conscience", "divine right of kings", or just plain having a gun as an argument. While merits of these options can be discussed, they all are incompatible with "rule of law", let alone "democracy", that many hood dear and consider the very soil on which the economic prosperity has grown. (We have most of Africa and Central Asia as a control group.)

Also allow that laws may be changed.

The process of changing laws is usually relatively slow, and involves discussing various consequences the change may have. I just wish this process was applied in the case.

…is a separate notion from fairness. Looks like you've read way too much in my comment.

Incidentally, laws can lawfully be changed.

We can consider the rights of the various stakeholders of the company, consumers, shareholders, employees, neighbours and suppliers. But the idea that the corporation itself has anything equivalent to human rights is very distasteful.

The idea of corporate personhood is a thing in US law at least, but it is the idea that the corporation is a person, not that it is a group of people.

The concept of rights doesn't even apply, in the same way that "society" doesn't have rights. Individuals have rights. Taking money from a company means taking money from the people who own it. It doesn't exist apart from them. Making it seem so just makes it easier to violate the rights of the individuals involved.

To me, it's as ridiculous as things like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

Apple and Amazon are fundamentally different from Google and Facebook and shouldn’t even be mentioned together. The former want to sell you real products and services, the latter just want to trick you out of your personal data so they can sell it on.

https://mashable.com/2017/09/27/amazon-echo-show-youtube-acc...

If you want to break up Apple due to its economic power, then you have dozens of other corporations to slice into pieces. How? Who knows, some bureacrat with likely zero relevant qualifications will get to decide.

If you take apart Apple, then you have to rip apart:

Berkshire Hathaway, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, nVidia, Netflix, Adobe, Activision Blizzard, Priceline, Exxon, Chevron, Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, AbbVie, Abbott Labs, Gilead, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Lockheed Martin, Visa, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Heinz, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, McDonald's, Starbucks, Nike, DowDupont, Disney, Boeing, CVS, Walgreens. I'd add GE to that list, but they've decided to take care of it themselves.

You also reasonably have to start dealing harshly with similarly massive corporations HQ'd outside your jurisdiction, when they attempt to operate within your borders. Whether that's SAP, Toyota, Alibaba, AmBev, etc.

Now, on some of those, without question, a large audience is shaking their head yes. For example, the big banks. There is a large segment that overwhelmingly thinks they need broken up. How do you forcibly break up 3M, Boeing and Home Depot? That's just begging for disaster.

Then after you're done screwing with the economy, you have to pass a law that prevents nearly any acquisitions, so the giants outside your borders don't just scoop up the now weaker smaller entities and so that new giants never get constructed again.

Good luck.

This is about economic power, reach, influence over daily life. Berkshire reaches into daily American life every bit as much as Amazon does. The difference is you don't see a lot of what Berkshire does.

Berkshire's energy position is massive. They operate one of the largest railroads. They operate one of the world's largest insurance businesses (or several of them if you view them seperately). They have huge influential stakes in everything from the largest banks to Coca Cola to Kraft Heinz. They're one of the largest owners of Apple.

I'd argue their influence on daily American life exceeds that of Amazon.

I'm not sure what US law considers when breaking up companies. I recall AT&T being broken up but did it have any control over the new companies?

If the four companies get too big and cause problems (tax avoidance) yes break them up. But if not I'd say leave them as is.

Why is it fair or unfair to break up these companies? The government should be powerful isn't a reason.

I'll start: it's not protecting the consumer from monopoly prices. Google and Facebook don't charge the primary "consumer" anything, and ads are cheap. Amazon has competition (Walmart, Target). Apple has competition.

What might be fair is using the democratic will of the people (although this is really just something done by representatives who can be influenced and don't always act on our will) to pass laws specifying behavior of these companies as illegal. Actual behavior, things like collecting gigabytes of personal data per individual to target ads, not things like "having too much money." The companies are not outright destroyed if they can find a way to make money without leaning on that behavior.

Illegal anti-competitive practices? Have we forgotten about Microsoft already?

Fuck if I know, I'm not a Federal prosecutor.

Point is, it's not hard to draw a line between legal history (United States vs. Microsoft) and various software giants and their practices.

We've got a collective short-memory.

There were further cases brought by the EU over media players.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

Heck, they are opening up for years by themselves now.

> The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance

Are you arguing that this had no effect? What about the effect it had on having to tread more carefully in the future?

Threading more carefully : you may have a point there.

Please explain how those measures have cost them money or market share.