In absolutely no way is it a stretch to say that and I'm terribly surprised you have any upvotes. Are you aware of how many services Google provides for free that make my life (and probably yours) better?

Google Search

Google Maps

Android

Google Navigation (on Android)

Google Patent Search

Google Book Search (Working with libraries to digitize old books)

Gmail

Google Translate

Google Code

Google Summer of Code

Thousands of tech talks made available online

Google Docs

Google Calendar

and a lot more...

One of the core tenets of capitalism is that the success an innovation of private companies benefits the public. This isn't true in all cases, but most certainly it is in the case of Google.

sometimes multimillion sums are better spent on schools and hospitals

Do I even need to cite a source that says throwing more money at the public school system won't stop them them being so shitty? That's a pretty common thing to hear now -- especially on HN, and I very much think it's true (from personal experience).

And with hospitals, what exactly do you want more money for? More beds? More nurses? More money for the uninsured? Are you sure that will fix our nation's healthcare problem? I'm not an expert by any means whatsoever on this topic, but as far as I know, the quality of America's healthcare system, bad or good, is largely a function of governmental policy.

Are you aware of how many services the NHS provides for free which make my life better, despite being cripplingly underfunded?

I'm not saying that google are evil for avoiding taxes, bit neither am I convinced that I wouldn't be better off if the money made its way into my governments hands.

Why is this even a point under discussion?

Not free. All of those things are paid for by Ads. Google is a for-profit company making billions of dollars.

There is nothing evil about doing legal things to pay less taxes (large public corporations are practically required to); but that doesn't mean that the government shouldn't fix the exploit. If i'm paying 30% taxes on my minimal salary, i think Google can cough up a bit more than 1% on its billions. (Billions which are made possible by government infrastructure, research, etc).

There's an opportunity cost of private companies paying less tax too - either someone else pays more tax which marginally decreases their ability to be productive and enterprising or something purportedly socially beneficial doesn't get paid for. Even coupled with inspired management, the profit motive doesn't ensure that an acquisition of say, Dodgeball for the price of a hospital wing, is an optimal use of resources.

Easy: how many of the above services are profitable? The more taxes Google is forced to pay, the less they can invest in experimental and long-term projects.

You're going to have to explain to me how this is relevant.

What Google is doing is legal which means that you're trying to make this an argument about ethics. My point is that Google provides real value to millions of people around the world and has the resources, both human and monetary, to make real progress in many areas of technology which then benefit you and me. It benefits me more to have the money stay at Google than go to a failed school system or failing healthcare system.

Continuing to restate that Google provides a significant amount of value as acknowledged in my original post (and profiting directly from most of the value-adding-services to the extent that such services would continue to be invested in at a much higher tax rate) fails to defend the original bold assertion that "Anyone who thinks that England would do a better job with the money than Google hasn't been to England". As I'm a British citizen who has not only been to England but actually lives there and uses both Google and our government funded services, I feel I'm in a good place to dispute that claim.

Right now the principal problem with UK public services is a shortage of money; not a problem for Google and their profit-generating services. Google is not going to die if it takes them a little longer to generate shareholder return; people are going to die if they don't get hospital beds. Believing in the benefits to humanity from successful, innovative free enterprises != believing they and their investors should keep all the money.

Moreover even if one accepts the claim that Google and people smart enough to invest in Google are on average better at allocating resources equitably than the government I think it could be argued to be ethically dubious for them to pay lower tax rates than less profitable companies with equally ambitious and beneficial goals. Someone still has to foot the tax bill

But really, the continuing argument that because you like Google Maps it's therefore better that Google gets to keep all of its tax euros out of the hands of underfunded public services is close to incoherent.

Unless you can show that those services are in the same sort of existential danger as high-end cancer treatment is in the UK, the argument is specious.

Unless you can show that those services are in the same sort of existential danger as high-end cancer treatment is in the UK, the argument is specious.

a. I did not say that Google shouldn't pay any taxes.

b. Whether you believe something to be 'underfunded' is a matter of perspective.

c. Not funding cancer research is not equivalent to not doing good or creating value.

I think you do have a point in that Google's slogan does make this about ethics. I still maintain that Google can do more good with more efficiency than any government.

That's fine, but there are plenty of other people who disagree with the assertion. If the money is in the hands of the government, at least those other voices get a say in how it is spent.

The opportunity cost for anything you spend $3bn on is very high. A government could choose to spend it on cancer research or space ships. Google can really only spend it on a very narrow range of products -- and can't combine it with other serious numbers required to do the really heavy lifting, like that required to fix the disastrous public plumbing in the US.

If Google paying its taxes would mean that it couldn't do all the stuff it currently is, that's one thing. But they've got $33bn sitting in the bank. They can more than afford to pay their taxes and continue creating Wave and AdWords.

There are many other investments in cancer research and space travel being made by individual Googlers.

However, it is perhaps more to the point that both Google Search and Google Academic are crucial research tools for medical research and for aerospace engineering, as for many other fields.

Both directly and through its employees, Google is also funding substantial applied research in crucial areas such as renewable energy production, genomics, public health, and ground transportation.

I don't know what you mean by "disastrous public plumbing in the US". My experience with US municipal water supplies and sewers during the 29 years that I lived there was that they were inexpensive, reliable, safe, and efficient. My experience with water supplies (and sometimes sewers) in other countries has been much worse.

A personal note: I haven't ever tried to work for Google because of, essentially, ethical concerns: I am in danger of having to live in a world where a large fraction of our communications are intermediated by a single company, and I think Google's cultish secrecy is corrosive to the values of Silicon Valley. However, I think Google should only be dinged for its real faults, not imagined ones.

Google can afford to pay taxes in the countries in which it operates. That it does not, while obviously legally defensible, reflects poorly on the other work it does.

Public plumbing: the US infrastructure is badly out of date, and unable to meet most projected demands for expansion. The US Geological survey projects that 1.7 trillion gallons of water are lost through leaks in the system each year -- about $2.6bn in value. http://www.epa.gov/awi/distributionsys.html

$2.6 billion per year is about US$9 per person. Another point of comparison, if you're worried about conservation of fresh water, is that the Mississippi River discharges 110 trillion gallons of fresh water per year into the Gulf of Mexico, where it turns brackish. So the plumbing doesn't sound like a disastrous problem to me, particularly compared with problems like 1% of the adult US population being imprisoned, companies being raided for selling chemistry kits to kids, a decaying passenger train system that commonly delivers passengers several hours late, and government bailouts to pay the bonuses of the bankers who wrecked the economy.

All the other stuff, maps, email, translate, etc... were incremental improvements of already available and competitive free services.

You also neglected to list the dozens of flops that Google undoubtly spent millions, perhaps billions on. Remember Wave, Answers, Jaiku, Dodgeball, etc...? And how much of those billions of unpaid taxes went to buying out the competition and thus reducing the capitalist drive for improvement?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

Millions, even billions of dollars are siphoned off in people buying useless products like Acai Berry or junk bonds labled as AAA that do nothing for society or even themselves. Now imagine what other useless industries these people would invest given that a company like Google could make so many flops? That is essentially X times more waste where X is the percentage that these junk dealers reinvest.

As someone said more eloquently than I have: "Why do I need your government nanny state telling me how to build my cars? If people who drive my cars die, then they won't buy more cars. THE FREE MARKET WORKS PEOPLE."

Just in case you hadn't noticed, the post you are replying to is about the NHS, which is not affected by US government policy.

And Google should pay their F-ing taxes. I do.

And Google should pay their F-ing taxes. I do.

By all accounts, Google is paying the taxes they're legally obligated to. If you don't like the way those obligations play out, then you ought to be talking to your legislators, the ones who are architecting byzantine tax systems. Their efforts to control our behavior, pander to buy votes, etc., by giving preferential treatment to some, is what created the problem.

The ability to access my email from anywhere, organize, and quickly search through thousands and thousands of emails in seconds has improved my quality of life. Maybe not as much as indoor plumbing, but it has.

http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...

http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/gmailvs-hotm...

Of course, since you are only a college freshman, I don't blame you for not knowing that there were dozens of serviceable webmail clients long before the existence of gmail.

He thinks that Google invented or revolutionized webmail, maps, etc... when it is clear to anyone who's been on the internet for more than 8 years that they were only incremental updates.

Before Google sold gmail to colleges, my college and many others used squirrelmail and pine which was more than adequate. Any sizable college that had an IT department that could support email anyway.