Shouldn't the structure of accountability be in the other direction?
2. If companies can spend/earn $1B without anyone knowing, how are we going to tax them properly? If only the government knows and no one else, then we're basically asked to trust the government and corporations to be honest. When they are't, they cause much more financial harm to me (because my tax has to make up for it) than some county office giving everyone a higher raise than necessary.
Publicly traded companies already have to disclose salaries of their CEOs, but not their janitors. Same logic.
[0] I say voluntarily here, because of course it is voluntary; put down the phone or whatever. Yet, it's difficult to imagine the average HN user successfully opting-out of making Google money by using the internet (if only because the average HN user wouldn't actually care about most vectors for it). It's basically impossible for the average user to do this.
The reason it's so hard to avoid making Google money while you use the Internet isn't because of nefarious schemes, it's because Google kicks ass at what it does -- providing free services that are so good that most people use them, and matching eyeballs to ads using harvested info of said "most people". Regardless, when you're this big, you start to accrue responsibility (to, say, not be evil). Not that the capstone to this ranty footnote is "Google should be as transparent as government salaries", merely that that idea isn't actually too crazy when you consider the power Google wields over society via the Internet. Of course, the inconvenient reality of Google's position as a publicly traded company casts a huge shadow over any highfalutin prospect of serious responsibility to society, but a man can dream of a more reasonable system.
It's not somehow patriotic to pay more in taxes than one is legally obligated to pay.
The key word here is "obligated".
Google doesn't evade taxes - they pay what tax law obligates them to pay.
They just happen to have a team of accountants available to ensure they pay the correct amount (read as: the amount the US Government has decided, through tax laws, that a corporation like Google should pay).
Do you think that while slavery was legal, it would have been improper to criticize the companies that engaged in it?
pa·tri·ot·ic
having or expressing devotion to and vigorous support for one's country.
Consider that war bonds were often marketed with a patriotic message, and paying taxes above what is required is like accepting a war bond that immediately defaults, which seems a lot better for the country than one that it has to pay back.