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Comment by iammisc | Hacker News Reader

I'm just upset with the IRS. The IRS officers hold a position of public trust. Intuit does not.

Isn't the IRS just executing the policies that elected politicians decide? It seems the IRS wanted to do the right thing 20 years ago, but they were stopped by politicians who were corrupted by lobbyists.

Maybe US people should elect politicians that represent them instead of business. And stop buying the incredible amounts of double-speak that is always present in discussions like these.

Yes. I should restate... I'm not mad at low-level IRS employees. Rather the ones nominated and approved by Congress, who ultimately make these decisions.

It is Converse that makes these decisions, no? The IRS just does what it is told.

yes, in some regards, no in others.

Yes, in any regard that matters. The IRS cannot just decide to start doing this. They have to follow the law.

I'm not mad at congress, I'm mad at the fools who keep voting for them.

Those fools can only vote for whoever is running. Given a slate of candidates, if only one vote is cast by anyone, you will have a winner.

And so it goes.

There is a school of thought, and I tend to agree with it, that "a position of public trust" is exactly and specifically what is granted to a corporation by granting it its special, fictive-person, liability-shielding status. The veneration of "corporations as psychopaths" is more of a deification of the current state, not an aspirational one. It doesn't have to be that way, and so we absolutely can fault Intuit for acting against that public trust. Intuit has responsibilities to the society that grants it its charter, and that includes not peeing in the public pool.

(That school of thought, yeah, puts most companies in a real bad light. And? Well? Yes. They have earned it.)

> granted to a corporation by granting it its special, fictive-person, liability-shielding status.

There is no such thing. This is such a silly argument made by people who have no understanding of corporate liability laws.

Incorporating doesn't suddenly shield you from liability. If you were negligent or intended harm, you will be held personally liable. If you're a shareholder and knew what was going on, you will also be held liable. The issue is not incorporation, it's a government too timid to enforce the law.

I'm well aware of how corporate liability laws work, thank you. Intuit advocating to indirectly damage the body politic to increase their profits is not negligence. It is also wrong. The divide, and the hole in the modern theory of the corporation, is obvious when one is not hiding the cards.

It is a moral failure and a failure of social distinction, not a legal one. I understand why that shorts your circuit. It exists nevertheless.

I expect Intuit, and every other company where responsibility is sufficiently large that nobody feels personally responsible for the company's actions, to do heinous things to make a buck if the option presents itself.

Whereas the IRS, and every other government agency, is supposedly trying to help society or at least not hurt it.

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