My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Unlikely Economics Episode 2. | |
| Destroy the corporations by not taxing them. | |
| Now, folks, I don't like corporations for a variety of reasons. | |
| I'm very suspicious of them. | |
| They are effectively legal people that are complete psychopaths. | |
| They seek out only profit without considering the human consequences, the moral consequences of any of this. | |
| And the people, they're essentially artificial intelligences whose operating system is written in the legal code, but whose substrate, what they run off of, is human brains. | |
| So everybody involved in the corporation is running a software algorithm that is a psychopath, even if they themselves aren't. | |
| And the net result is something that's nearly sentient and doesn't care about humanity. | |
| So I am not a fan of corporations. | |
| However, I'm in complete agreement with my colleague Aaron Clary, the man who puts joy into the dismal science, that corporations should not be taxed. | |
| Why not? | |
| Well, the simple free market explanation is that everybody that works for the corporation is already being taxed. | |
| Corporations don't have money. | |
| Okay, the money they have, it all gets spent. | |
| You know, like maybe they save some up for a large investment or they invest it somewhere else, but the corporation itself, even though it's legally equal to a person, is not actually a person. | |
| And now people, everybody that works for the corporation, from the lowliest employee up to the CEO himself, they all pay taxes on this. | |
| So when you tax a corporation, you're double taxing. | |
| And since most of the stuff we buy is made by corporations, all you're doing is raising the price of everything. | |
| But you're hiding the price. | |
| There is nothing worse than a hidden tax because people don't feel it. | |
| They don't see it. | |
| When you actually pay your taxes, you are forced to ask yourself, what I'm getting? | |
| Is it worth it? | |
| Yeah, I'm paying 40% of my income in tax. | |
| Am I getting good quality services because of this? | |
| But when it's a hidden tax, when it's a tax on the corporation, you don't notice it. | |
| So that's the pure free market argument. | |
| Now, I'd like to take this a step further and argue that we shouldn't tax corporations because they're terrible. | |
| When you tax a corporation, you're doing two things. | |
| First of all, you're making the government reliant upon the corporation. | |
| Suddenly the government, if they're getting a substantial part of their revenue by taxing corporations, they're going to rely upon the continued existence of those corporations. | |
| And the corporations themselves, especially with the growth of things going multinational, they can seriously threaten the government. | |
| Now, if they weren't being taxed, you might say, well, they could threaten to leave and then nobody would have a job. | |
| Bullshit. | |
| The fact of the matter is that if there is an industry that is profitable, if there is oil to be dug out of the ground in Alberta, if there are trees to be knocked down in BC, somebody will be doing that. | |
| And a corporation can't just up and disappear. | |
| There is still going to be the infrastructure. | |
| There are still going to be these skilled people. | |
| If the corporation leaves, then all those people can take up doing exactly what was being done. | |
| They can form their own businesses to do this. | |
| It's going to be a disruption, but it won't be fatal. | |
| Whereas when the corporation is relied upon to pay these taxes regularly, then they can directly and immediately threaten the government. | |
| Second point is that when the corporation is being taxed and regulated and monitored, because we voted in some Soviet-style left-wing government that hates business and hates success, and it's this populist platform that we're going to make the corporation pay for all of your taxes. | |
| You won't be taxed anymore. | |
| We'll tax the corporation. | |
| Well, all of a sudden now the corporation, which again is a complete psychopath. | |
| The corporation doesn't care how the country's run. | |
| The corporation will support gay marriage if it's popular. | |
| It will be opposed to gay marriage if it's popular. | |
| You know, it's a psychopath. | |
| It doesn't care about anything. | |
| All of a sudden, now that you're regulating it, now that the populist government has all these opinions on corporations, the corporate entity, it's now interested in government. | |
| And ultimately, what this all comes back to is what is a corporation? | |
| It's a legal entity that our governments created. | |
| A limited liability corporation exists only because governments say it exists. | |
| It's a legal fiction. | |
| And I think that with every corporation, we should be looking at it and saying, is this legal fiction good for our country? | |
| Is this legal fiction good for our society? | |
| Now, as the individual shareholder of a corporation, certainly it makes a lot of sense. | |
| You know, you are no longer liable for the damage that your company causes. | |
| You know, you can wash your hands of it all. | |
| And there's certainly cases where corporations do make a lot of sense. | |
| For one thing, they preserve knowledge. | |
| They preserve patents that with a small business, with a family-owned business, those patents could easily be lost if none of your kids want to become a cobbler. | |
| Corporations are very good at preserving that. | |
| They do have their uses. | |
| But an over-reliance upon them does kind of result in this corporate left-wing dystopia that we have right now. | |
| So me, I don't like corporations for the most part, which is why I try and use small businesses whenever I have the choice, and which is why I don't think they should be taxed. | |
| Because if we stop taxing corporations, it's easier to get rid of them. | |
| Taxing them to death just guarantees their longevity. | |
| If you actually want to encourage entrepreneurship in small businesses, you should be advocating that we get rid of the tax on corporations. | |
| This has been Unlikely Economics. |