Here’s a different lens: tax is a mechanism for determining who pays for shared infrastructure and social services.
Any entity that has to pay obviously has other ways they can more productively (as seen from the entity level) deploy the cash.
But ideally we are not optimizing for a single entity or class of entity, we’re trying to optimize at the societal level.
We know that corporations can bear some burden, because we are taxing profits. I couldn’t tell you whether this is an optimal place to tax, but it intuitively feels reasonable - corporations are large non-governmental concentrations of wealth and power. This seems like a valid pool to tap for funding the state, and better than many alternatives (e.g. taxing the poor and powerless).
Any entity that has to pay obviously has other ways they can more productively (as seen from the entity level) deploy the cash.
But ideally we are not optimizing for a single entity or class of entity, we’re trying to optimize at the societal level.
We know that corporations can bear some burden, because we are taxing profits. I couldn’t tell you whether this is an optimal place to tax, but it intuitively feels reasonable - corporations are large non-governmental concentrations of wealth and power. This seems like a valid pool to tap for funding the state, and better than many alternatives (e.g. taxing the poor and powerless).