Operating under the assumption that most replies are from US citizens: the people of the US have a love/hate relationship with taxes. Most of the time theyre fine with taxing others so that they could reap the benefits, they just dont want to be taxed themselves.

Isn't that like... everyone?

I like to think I don’t make every decision with a sociopathic level of self interest. I hope at least some others do too

Corporate tax in general is the wrong type of taxation.

Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.

Yes, but increased profits (by running profitably) also increases returns for the shareholders... A good thing.

But you don't increase profits, what you do is spend that money recklessly on R&D that has a lower ROI than if that money was spent outside the company. However, once taxes are factored in the ROI is better than paying taxes due to an increase in the share price.

So what you incentivize is the misallocation of funds from their most beneficial use outside the organization to something in the organization.

Profits, if not able to be reallocated for more profit should be return to shareholders.

Taxes should be taken into account in calculating where the best ROI would be here. Obviously it changes when you would return profit to shareholders.

My point is that it's a bad tax because it can be controlled and at the same time corporate tax controls the business decisions. This should not be the case in my opinion. Think about it. I think it would be better to focus on sales tax. Also, it would make tax rules much easier to understand.

You, the consumer, pay the corporate tax.

When people talk about the "corporate tax", they're talking about the tax on corporate profits, which belong to the shareholders. You could theoretically tax the shareholders directly instead when they receive those profits as dividends etc (and there might be some advantage to doing so - it's more clear which country taxes should be paid in, and you can have a lower dividend tax rate for people with low incomes).

There's no reason for a company to raise consumer prices in response to a change in the corporate tax rate - if a company can make more profits just by raising prices, they should do so anyway regardless of what the tax rate is.

That's true - but taxes *always* disincentivize the thing being taxed. If investment in a company is less profitable under taxation than it otherwise would be, there will be less investment in that company, no exceptions. Now the size of that effect is quite likely to be negligible for the companies in question here. But it's at least theoretically possible that taxing corporate profits could lead to a change in the marketplace, including market dropout, that might actually lead to consumers paying higher prices to the remaining members of a market with reduced competition.

Further, if all companies in an already low-competition marketplace are equally affected by the tax, then it's quite possible for all of them to ~simultaneously raise prices to offset the tax, with or without explicitly illegal coordination, knowing that the others will follow suit.

Sure, there are definitely second and third order effects. Taxing shareholders may reduce the incomes of wealthy people, who have a higher savings rate, leading to a reduced national savings rate, higher interest rates and lower asset prices, which could cause some businesses to decide against doing certain investments that wouldn't have a high enough return (relative to the interest rate on that capital).

Since everything is tied together it's hard to reason through all of this. For companies making investment decisions the interest rate will obviously be one factor, but projected consumer demand will be another, and it's easy to imagine in some cases higher middle-class incomes and consumer demand might be more important than a lower interest rate for decisions around building new factories etc.

Obviously it's complex and I don't have a strongly-held opinion. But taking a historical perspective interest rates are near record lows and financial asset prices are at record highs. On those grounds policies that might nudge us back a little into where the economy has been operating for the past 50 years (regarding interest rates etc) seem less risky than ones that push us further away from our post-WWII historical experience.

Nope, the tax is paid on the profit (i.e. post consumer).

Personally, I'm a strong believer that decentralized systems are more robust than any centralized or distributed alternative. I see no reason why geopolitics would differ from software in this case. In fact, the most effective use case for decentralized software occurs when centralized (geo)political governance creates friction or reduces optionality. For examples, see Napster, Bitcoin, Tor, etc. – their decentralization provides robustness against failure modes created by centralized governance and regulatory capture.

So if the principles of software and politics are already so closely aligned, isn't it reasonable to assume that 136 independent governing bodies would be more robust than one?

Globalism is inherently fragile. This is part of a continued trend which has enough inertia to carry us to an inflection point where it could conceivably destroy everything human, either in real terms or something less tractable. We made a wrong turn a very long time ago, and since we've been extraordinarily misdirected but inextricably committed to the mistake we've made. We're totally in the dark, and truth becomes ever more indefinite as we travel down this timeline and the path we [never] elected.

You see, the way that we made exchange was translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one. Dollar valuations of a lifetimes is an intrinsically abhorrent concept. A life can never be repaid, thus it can never be valued in real terms - yet it is, billions of times over. Globalism is just a long-range result of this. Exploitation and undervaluing of billions of lives in order to create increasingly competitive products to grow dollar values of a investments in the hands of an increasingly small proportion of the population. This itself founded on false pretense.

Every move towards globalism is increasingly dangerous, this is no exception.

This is a lot of doomsaying, with no evidence and very little details or logic. It's like you expect your reader to already agree with you and nod along to "mistake" and "misdirected" and all the other negative language you use without any explanation of what you're actually talking about.

> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago

What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Otherwise: what are you talking about?

> translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one.

What? Can you explain what this is supposed to mean?

I don't understand the comment you replied to either. To my naive mind it sounds like a lot of words put together to make it look like something deep, but that doesn't actually mean something. It'd be happy to be showed wrong here with historical events to describe "the wrong" turns and such to be able to tell if it's not just a abstraction or feelings that went a bit to far.

Could it be a lot of words to describe an interpretation of globalization as a perceived single point of failure across every subsection of civilization/humanity?

>> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago

> What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that.

Are there really people who believe that? I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"

The author probably wouldn't have been to write his book or share these thoughts to more than 30 people without the invention of agriculture...

> I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"

The argument I saw put more emphasis on things like nutritional deficiencies after the switch [1], reflected in average male height going from 5'9" to 5'3". Obviously in the long run agriculture became very efficient, but he makes a reasonable case that in the short run individual quality of life went downhill, with the main advantage being reaching higher population densities before being at the limit of the food supply, and so winning any conflicts with hunter-gatherer societies.

[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

The idea, at least as I’ve seen it a number of places, wasn’t that agriculture was a long-run bad idea, but that for a very long time it decreased the median quality of life (while also greatly reducing volatility in the quality of life for most people, and enabling extraordinary improvements in the quality of life for – again, for a very long time – an extremely narrow elite.)

I am as confused as you are; this reads almost like GPT-3 generated text - there are words that resolve to sentences, it scans like real human writing, but there's little to no information communicated.

The breakdown is basically:

* A statement of the premise: "Globalism is bad" without defining 'globalism'.

* Some vague ominous sentences that sound like they reinforce the premise but don't.

* A long paragraph that basically makes the statement "Human lives can't be assigned a dollar value" with no real attempt to tie it to the premise.

* Restatement of the premise.

What you just wrote is a lot of verbal diarrhea without any examples or backing at all.

> Globalism is inherently fragile > Every move towards globalism is increasingly dangerous, this is no exception.

I don’t really agree in the slightest unless you’re making the claim that all political systems above the family level are inherently fragile in which case it’s a moot point. The previous international standard was war when there were major disagreements. Globalism has helped make the entire planet relatively(relative is doing a lot of heavy lifting here but still counts) peaceful compared to the past