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I still think there's a difference between the following philosophies:
Who is the "they" here? The employees of the company? Shareholders?
In either case I don't think it's relevant; my comment was more an observation of the fact that some people believe the only purpose of companies is to make money for the owners.
I might, though, go so far as to argue that most shareholders "do it" for almost nothing: they risk only financial loss, but have no responsibility for the activities of their company. Have shareholders ever been held responsible for the actions of the company they "own"?
It's a shame that people tend to view the purpose of (public) companies is to make money for their owners, rather than provide a product or service which can only be provided by pooling the resources of a group of people acting corporately.
And any economist will tell you trade creates wealth, by the simple fact that as long as both parties are willing, they're both getting something they want.
Not any economist I know!
Wealth is exactly constant during a trade. Now, value may increase (if it's a good trade), but wealth is constant. Wealth is only created by manufacturing and agriculture. Wealth is destroyed by consumption and decay (or active destructive activity like demolition, or disaters).
More trade may encourage the creation of new wealth, but it most definitely does not create it directly.
The trouble with most schemes to "better account for the cost of the externality" is that they don't actually better account for the cost of the externality. They just come up with some arbitrary pricing scheme (even a cap and trade market ends up being arbitrary) because the imposed cost is not linked in any way to the benefit of reducing the perceived unwanted external effect.
If, on the other hand, people had a market where (for example) you could trade health care discounts for increases in energy cost - then you would see a better representation of the cost of the externality. Or perhaps trading tax reductions for higher energy prices. I've never seen a proposal to do this, though. Instead people are asked to "pay more for energy now, so it will maybe reduce the chance you get sick in the future, and so maybe reduce the amount of health care cost increase in the future."
Ugh. I think the fair tax is perhaps the worst type of tax there is (consumption tax).
I've been reading and thinking a lot about taxes, and the perceived problems with taxes. Fundamentally, I believe that you should never tax consumption or production - what you should tax instead is "idle wealth" because you want resources to be used, not sitting idle. I therefore believe all taxes should be based on net wealth, but with a slight caveat:
The tax will still be an income tax only, but the tax rate is based on total net worth. This would help reduce the amount to which the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" because poor people hold little wealth, so they will get to keep much of their income. The wealthy, however, since they are wealthy, would only be able to grow their wealth more and more slowly.
This is actually simpler than the Fair tax; you don't have to worry about taxing transactions or giving some kind of "credit" based on some average (and therefore incorrect) assumed "minimum standard of living" for food and clothing purchases or whatever.
Probably the most difficult aspects of what I've been thinking will be to figure out how to scale the tax rate appropriately to the wealth; it should probably be done somehow based on relative wealth (rather than an absolute number; e.g., perhaps your income tax rate should be the square of the wealth percentile in which you fall. If you're in the 1%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate is 0.01%; if you're in the 99%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate would be 98%). Note that this is not a marginal rate - this is the actual tax rate.
The other trick will be to figure out how to assign property, so people don't simply hide all their wealth in a holding company. Probably have to base it on shares held or something like that... but it's a proposal that is much more likely to help reduce income inequality, avoid punishing people for being productive, and prevent wealth from aggregating in the hands of a few.
I've always thought this "double taxation" argument is silly, because every single monetary unit exchanged is taxed multiple times.
Someone pays my employer money. My employer pays me some of that money and so pays payroll tax, and I pay income tax. My employer, presuming they make some profit, pays some corporate taxes on some of that money. When I buy something with my money, I probably pay sales tax on it. If I buy property, I pay property tax.
Where in this chain is there any money that is not "taxed multiple times"?
To be fair, there are a couple really good scenes in Revenge of the Sith. As a whole the movie is indeed pretty lacking, but if the whole movie had more scenes like the following, it could have been something truly grand:
The best is the scene (sans dialog!) where (eh, am I really going to spoiler this?) there is one character looking across the city toward where another character is doing something atrocious. That is a brilliant scene, where there is actually a glimpse of emotion, conveyed not by dialog or effects, but simple imagery and the score.
It's too bad, really, that the rest of the movie is so full of cliche and noise.
The "Fair Tax"
There is no such thing as a "fair" tax other than a simple per-capita fee. Taxing income isn't "fair" because it's essentially a limited form of slavery (a portion of one's labor is forcibly appropriated by someone else). Taxing consumption isn't "fair" because consumption is a different fraction of wealth for different populations.
But people don't really want a "fair" tax; they want a "tax everyone else more than me" tax.
A much better system is probably something like an income tax based not on income, but on accumulated wealth. So an organization (individual or corporation or trust, etc.) with zero assets would have zero tax, but if there are equivalent assets of $10M per person, the income tax should be close to 100% (after all, $10M is enough for $100k for 100 years!)
Such a system would help the poor, would help address income equality issues, and is inherently progressive since taxation is not in any way related to consumption. When applied to corporations it would result in lower costs for everything or higher incomes for employes, as companies would have less incentive to simply accumulate massive profits. It's also self regulating, since if you have zero income then the taxes decrease each year as the assets are utilized (for instance, if you are drawing down savings). This system also doesn't tax activity - which is what any income or consumption based tax does. Instead, it taxes accumulation.
Now, this is a radically different system than anyone has ever implemented, so will probably find no support - especially not among the rich who will scream that it affects them negatively (and they'd be right; this is not a "fair" proposal).
Out of curiosity: are they buying physical gold, storing it in a safe under their own control?
If not, then their "purchase" of gold is just as useless as putting money in the bank, buying stocks, etc. If things really do get that bad, why on earth would a rational person think their "gold account" will still be credited to them?
There's a slight difference, though, between "being responsible" and "being forced to behave in a certain way."
I agree that it's disappointing that people don't do what they can, even simple things, but it's actually rational: the cost that "influential groups" are trying to impose on the individual is so high that those costs are perceived to exceed the benefits obtained by mitigating the externalities.
Consider people saying gasoline prices should double today; that will massively impact current quality of living, and people are just not seeing that it's worth it for the possibility of slightly lower prices for, say, home insurance, in the future. Compound that with the fact that people already know that prices of insurance are going up anyway, and then you realize that you're paying now for a lesser increase in the future, and it's wholly rational why people are resistant to pay for these things today.
If you could actually show that paying for things now would make other things cost less in the future (compared to now, not to some estimated future cost if the activities took place) and people would jump all over it.
Case in point: people won't even buy a Volt because it costs almost twice as much as a traditional sedan, even though you can probably recover that extra cost over the lifetime of the vehicle and come out ahead.
People get paid to collect litter and sweep streets. They do it because it's necessary to keep the place liveable in.
No, they get paid not because it's necessary, but because people are willing to pay them so they don't have to live in squalor and because they are too lazy to take the trash to a dump themselves. (There are many places around the world where people are not willing to pay for trash pickup, and so trash piles up everywhere...)
There are other important differences, as well, such as the fact that refuse accumulation is not a probabilistic event but a deterministic one, and all the climate change issues are probabilistic*. While you might argue it's government's role to step in to address these probabilistic events, it gets tricky because who decides what the acceptable rate of return is on the "preventive measures"?
*Yes, on the whole, you can say that "the climate will change" and that is deterministic; what is probabilistic is the specific effect in a particular geographic area, be it changes in land arability, sea level, or frequency and magnitude of severe weather events.
This sounds all well and good, but here's the question:
How much money are you going to pay me to do nothing with my time other than sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere? I'm willing to do it, but I'm not going to do it for free.
I personally think even statically linking shouldn't make your product be a derivative work. An automobile is not a derivative product of the engine, even though the engine is "included" in the product.
I think the terms used in the license related to linking should make this explicit: If you have a fixed dependency on this code such as static linking, then your product must also be GPL, because your product is including a copy of our work. If you link dynamically, then we can't care, because you're only relying on an API, and the courts have ruled that you can't copyright an API.
What you would have to do if you distributed a work that's dynamically linked is provide source for all the dynamic libraries if you distribute those libraries with your source, because of their license, but if you just send the application and assume the user has appropriate libraries, then there can be no restriction on the application.
This should be fairly obvious: there is no (and can be no) violation of Microsoft or Apple copyright with an application for Windows or MacOS, even though those applications most surely dynamically link to copyrighted libraries.
Of course, most of this argument and personal opinion is based on logic, and I'm well aware that courts have no requirement to base their precedents on logic.
It's sad that so few people realize this.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.