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Except they don't. They create corporations to do it for them.

As long as creating a legal fiction is a mere matter of having someone else do paperwork, you either need to extract tax from legal fictions, or kiss a big chunk of taxable activity goodbye.

I don't think that's accurate if we're talking about large publicly listed companies, the only way for shareholders to spend the money on themselves is to take it out via dividends or sell the stock for a capital gain.

Shareholders can take out a loan for spending money that uses the shares as collateral.

To pay back the loan they need to sell the stock which is a capital gains event.

The two main tax avoidance strategies would be people running and retiring overseas just before selling, or never selling and waiting for the cost basis to be reset upon their death.

This isn’t legal. A corporation that leases someone a car and a house is paying them a taxable income, regardless of it not being a cash income.

It is trivial to work around.

Spending would turn into various non-monetary and indirect compensations. It is going already but would get even more efficient.

That would require a progressive, rather than moralistic, sales tax.