That is a totally reasonable point of view, but it's important for USA to put its foot down to prevent this from being used as a loophole to pretty much all labor laws. Pretty soon US companies would only hire foreign nationals to do their work.

read up on mens rea

You mean, rich people have more to spend. You are perhaps morally opposed to redistributive effects of taxation, but you'll have a hard time arguing that it doesn't improve the spending power of the poor.

You got things confused. Government is supposed to act in the interest of all citizens. Businesses act in the interest of their shareholders, not the typical consumer. Sometimes these interests align, and sometimes they don't.

You don't personally know a good representative sample of people.

Exactly. To generalize an attribute to sex is sexism, because people aren't average. If we need strong people to be firefighters, then should we require that firefighters be men? No, because we can simply require people to pass a strength test.

And how does the most metabolically active female compare to the least metabolically active male?

That's actually what they do with the jails in many places.

Is crime dropping because of "tough on crime" or is it dropping because we phased out leaded gasoline?

There's no point in arguing with people like you, who think of poor people as poo. The only way your worldview could be redeemed is by experiencing poverty yourself.

Perhaps I should have emphasized progressive. It is very simple to collect a flat (regressive) tax at the point of sale. The store doesn't have the information to collect a progressive tax.

Never is too strong a word. Taxation does of course reduce people's buying power, but the numbers can be tweaked so that people can still buy houses and stuff while still funding government. There can be a progressive scheme if necessary, but the nature of wealth tax makes it already pretty progressive.

I want to know where you got this idea that taxes on consumption tend to be progressive. It's almost certainly regressive, unless you exempt the right mix of basic goods.
What counts as "consumption"? A poor person spends most eir money on rent, food, possibly car, and possibly cigarettes and booze.
A rich person invests a bunch, buys several million dollar houses, hires maids and gardeners to clean these houses, buys some cars, new electronics, and probably eats out a lot and goes to high-end concerts and travels the world.
A rich person spends a far higher percentage on capital goods and on employing people and only a small percentage on consumables. Also, you can't really tax consumption while traveling. The best you can do is tax the transportation, and tax rich tourists who come _here_

Who uses the nonrenewable resource? The company that digs it from the ground? The person who burns it? The company that converts it into a manufactured product? The person who buys the product? The person who throws it away?

You don't "consume" expensive toys like yachts. You invest in them. Or at least, that's what you will tell the IRS. If that won't fly, you form a company that buys yachts and you invest in the company.