Such a pile of crap, by Icahn, of course. Corporations do not exist in a vacuum of social irresponsibility and their first duty is certainly not to their shareholders but to the people they employ and to the societies they thrive on.
"Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."
- Judge Learned Hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_Hand)
Given that corporations are conscience-less entities, the de jure minimums become the de facto outcomes.
Being mean to your elderly parents conflicts with a few of these ideals.
In Germany, our constitution says in §14.2: "Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.", translated roughly to "Ownership creates duties. Its use shall be for common welfare."
For me, looks like the failure is in the US constitution which does not focus on the common good.
You can tax the property of people without taxing corporations. The former can be done with reasonable effort and effectiveness because the location of someone and their home's can be determined. Taxing corporations has proven unreliable and ineffective because they're often just a mailbox in s tax haven and profits are moved to other entities easily (via licensing fees etc.). There's also no real need to tax them, as you can tax their owners.
Thats what happens in Ireland, corporation tax is lowish (12.5%) and theres not that many loopholes/concessions as in other EU states where companies can reduce their corporate tax to near nothing already
BUT personal taxes are a murder
Lets say you are a director of startup and the company has€100000 left after costs and taxes etc, lets say as director you want to pay yourself a salary of 100K for your hard work, you be lucky you be left with 50K after income tax, PAYE/PRSI insurance tax and "Universal Social Charge"
On the money that you have left you would have to pay for medical insurance (aint free here like UK), VAT of 23% on almost anything you buy (more for cars, less for food etc), new property and water taxes and so on
Keep in mind that Ireland gets blamed for alot of this goings on, but its just a step on path large corporations take to move money onto Carribean.
The problem is: this won't happen, as people by nature are too greedy. They will spend the minimum until someone finds a tax loophole and then in a rush all the money is gone and untaxable.
Typical extracted profits are dividends. In my country, tax is due and payable by the corporation as soon as dividends are issued and unless you're a majority owner, you have no control over when dividends are paid (certainly true for Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. shareholders).
What a constitution says and how a country operates are two different things.
Also, and this is something I think we're all guilty of, you're comparing documents from two radically different eras. By German constitution I'm assuming you mean the Basic Law? There are lot of differences between the Englishman of 1789 and the Germans (as coerced by the French, English, and Americans) of 1949.
As such, law contains many places (usually preambles and stuff) that are there to just give context and aid the interpreter in filling in the gaps, when he centuries later tries to decide on what elected officials that formulated the law were hoping to achieve.
It's sort of like having "0" == 0 in PHP .. "How on earth can this be a programming language?" .. but ultimately its still here and gets the job done .. and in some niches its even borderline-useful .. because it's written by people that ultimately are imperfect and guided by lizard brains .. and the target audience are imperfect people too ..
But with such a law it is impossible to specify anything. It just states that private property is to be used for the "common good".
What is the "common good"? I have my understanding of the common good which might be different from yours, so how are you going to codify that? This is a prerequisite to judging entities for infractions against this "common good".
Yes, the state humanity finds itself in is a sad one. Patch atop patch atop patch .. for centuries (millenias?) by now. But what can you do? Everything else so far has failed in even more spectacular ways.
- Thomas Jefferson
The problem I see is that everyone will have his own idea about that. For some it will be upholding religious morals, for others it will be socialism. Could be really anything.