Maggie's Farm

I used to be astounded when independent, conservative, liberty-minded types who thrive on everybody minding their own business and government especially minding its promoted zero corporate taxes. I used to be astounded when these same rock-ribbed, flinty types lectured that, duh, corporate tax passed on to consumers in goods and services.

Of course it does. But that's not the point is it?

The point of zero corporate tax thinking is fallacious. Thousands of corporations, rife with crony capitalism and in bed with the worst of American statism, pay no tax because they can finagle the means not to. The canard about the US having the highest theoretical corporate tax rate is just that, a canard.

And zeroing corporate tax for the Corporate State does what? It does exactly what that State wants: To free itself to tax-oppress the remaining tax base: rock-ribbed, flinty, independent, conservative, liberty-minded types who thrive on everybody minding their own business and government minding its most of all.

Any plea to eliminate corporate tax had better immediately include a far more urgent demand to first release the individual from personal liability. The only fair tax is already so-labeled: It is a national flat consumption Fair Tax.

And sadly, it will never happen. Because that would involve first neutering the Corporate State and outlawing its professional lobby.

Wrong. See GE.

Look, if you don't grasp the crony capitalism at the root of all things far left - the root of statism - you've already lost.

And yet the core of your rebuttal is playground-level assertion. Nicely played, Einstein.

"Ignoring reality" it is then. But oddly, this second time too you offer nothing more than another vague charge. A most intelligent argument for whatever it is you're promoting as "reality".

As for actual reality, if there is to be a fair tax and if it is to be beholden to the voter, aside from the profoundly corrupt monetary system and the federalized economics that flow from it, it's going to have to be one of two things.

In order or preference:

1. A national tax on consumption. In other words, on using the economy voluntarily.

2. A corporate tax.

See, corporations are precisely the agency to intervene as liable parties where free men have the wisdom to not subject themselves personally to such burden under pain of law.

The nature of that reality, Jess1, even has the Framer's and Founder's imprimatur on it, should you wish to actually cite as concrete as it is rooted in the reason and common sense of sovereign individuality.

What simple terms are these, Jess1? Where I agree with comments preferring a fair tax? Where I correctly identify the core issue being tax-avoiding cronyism, to which you simultaneously take issue while proving the point?

You saw away on some internal rail, finding it more to your liking to, as it turns out, talk about how you pay no corporate tax when I suggest that is the very problem.

As for your baseless assertion that the Founders and Framers never believed in sovereign men, freed from bondage to the liability of personal taxation, that, sir, is perhaps the most bizarre formulation I've come across in months.

I suggest you go back and regroup. You do not know what it is you are saying. Holding my remarks up to inspection by that odd trajectory is even odder than it is itself.

How that reality eludes you is beyond me...

Right. Because I'm prescient and can - or care to - divine your personal conditions. Einstein.

And, owing to your unique brand of weird, because fair tax somehow [i]isn't]/i], because corporations should pay tax whenever they can avoid it altogether, and because the Framers were totalitarians, promoting tax servitude wherever they went.

Like I said, even you don't know what you're saying.

You are as obtuse as you are intellectually shifty.

1. One does indeed have to divine your personal conditions in order for you to assert them after the fact and expect them to carry weight. Cause, effect. Sorry.

2. "Fair tax", Einstein, is the term used for a tax on consumption; on purchases; on voluntary use of the economy. It is both the brand - Fair Tax - and, not ironically, the reality - as in fairly - of how this tax, alone, operates.

3. When actually I read what you actually write I naturally find you actually inconclusive, meandering, and liberty-taking with common words and their definitions. "Reality" being one. Tax, fair, Framer, and others also qualifying.

4. I am not asserting you pay the most tax possible nor can any reasonable interpretation of anything I've said construe that. I'm quite certain, if I can repeat myself yet again, that a tax on consumption is quite suitable to inform the voter what economic reality he lives in, thus reducing his burden and shrinking his servitude.

Rock-ribbed Republicans, as I asserted before you went well off topic, tend to assert that liberty, prosperity, property, and the pursuit of happiness are built on freeing corporations - they already with plenty of knives to the nation's throat - in order to place individuals into servitude.

This is, contrary to your reinterpretation of this reality of yours, does not begin to comport with structural constitutionalism, and thus is not actually conservative.

So here we are yet again: You are as obtuse as you are oddly reasoned.