I know that it makes people feel so much better when they can go after the rich corporate fat cats.  Of course it all turns to tears when they realize the rich fat cat was the one who was paying their salaries.  Even microsoft is threatening to move jobs overseas.

When are people going to learn that if you eat the golden goose it won’t lay any more eggs.  But it makes a bunch of short-sighted people feel better.  Everyone who works for corporations please raise your hand.  Ok that is just about everyone who still has a job.  And everyone who works at a school raise your hands too.  The corporations give educational institutions a lot of money.  So in a way you too work for the corporations.

I believe that corporate income taxes are simply counter productive.  The reason being is simple, when you have corporation the corporation has to employ people.  When people are employed by a private company then the state does not need to pay them to not come after the government with pitchforks. 

Employment for the average person has a lot of advantages both for the person but also for the government.  When a person is working they are less likely commit crime, protest in the street, and in general are just so much less annoying for the government.  After all if someone is home all day watching TV, surfing the internet, or just hanging around they so much more likely to start causing trouble.  This just requires more police, fireman, and morgue employees.

Employment is not just good for the government either it is also good for the person doing the work.  Let us assume the person doing the work at least believes that what they are doing is meaningful to someone (which is one the failures of communism more on this in a later post).  So the person has a job that they believe is doing some type of good, they don’t have wake up in the morning thinking they have the greatest job in the world for this to work either.  Said person has a purpose to their life.  They feel that they have some form of control.  In addition they have a strong separation between free time and work time.  This is very important as someone who either works all the time is burden to themselves, and a person who plays all the time is burden to everyone else.

Now that we have established that employment of people is a good thing we can also establish that we need something to employ them.  Well that is where corporations come into play.  Unlike small businesses (which are just smaller corporations), corporations have to employ a lot of low skilled specialists, in addition the usual skilled specialists.  These types of low skilled specialists must be drawn from the local population.  These are positions like mail room clerks,  janitors, the random copy and printer lady, computer helpdesk people (these are little more skilled), and we can’t forget the random hottie that always ends up at the front desk to greet people.  We all know that she is not going to be climbing the corporate ladder, maybe the corporate pole, but not the ladder.

See all these positions must be filled by the local population of the corporate office.  And when the government makes it very hard to do business and make a profit the corporation will move its offices.  There are plenty of countries in the world who would be more than happy to have these corporations put their shell headquarters in their country. 

Given all the bonuses I have outlined about the employment opportunities of keeping corporations happy why piss them off with higher taxes?  Because some left wing nut bags who can’t see the end result of their own jealously leads them to?