From Holman Jenkins at The WSJ, Harmonize this Eurocrats, [1]
What about the undoubted problem of companies like Apple shielding their globally earned profits behind a small country’s friendly tax regime? There’s a remarkably sanitary solution: Get rid of the corporate income tax.
Companies receive their revenues from their customers and distribute them to their suppliers, investors and employees. Thus corporate taxes can be eliminated in complete comfort that the revenue will pop up elsewhere as taxable personal income or taxable consumption expenditure.
The only real function of a corporate income tax is non-transparency. Taxing a company is a way for politicians to pretend they are not taxing any actual voter to pay for programs that voters find desirable as long as they seem not to come with a price tag.
Drop the pretense that citizens don’t have to pay for the amenities they want, and real harmonization becomes possible: The harmonization of tax and spending priorities in the direction of efficiently fostering the clean, peaceful, orderly and civilized countries that productive citizens enjoy living in.