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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

That of course depends on what you mean by "society".

But everybody is able to reinvest profits into a business they have, whether that's an industry giant, or a tiny one-man shop. There is no government on planet Earth which considers that to be "tax avoidance". Governments want profits to be reinvested and not paid out to owners, even the most socialist governments you can find.

If you're against this, then you shouldn't talk about taxes. You should rather talk about abolishing private property completely.

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> That of course depends on what you mean by "society".

Yes, that is the old discrepancy between society in the true sense and society as imagined by libertarians. A few strangers waiting together for the bus do not constitute a community. If the bus is canceled and they organize a carpool, then a community has formed. If you scale this up and replace personal relationships with institutions, you have a useful concept of society.

For libertarians, society is any large gathering of people who interact with each other in some way (or not), even if they rape and devour each other. If you understand society in this way, it cannot collapse (or is constantly collapsing).

If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed.

That would be the consequence of taxing ownership in companies, since there would be no reason to invest to create big companies. And for industrial society you need big companies. You need giant companies, and taxing owners on the size of the company means that people will not invest their money or effort build industrial scale companies.

The other way to have industrialization is to instead have a command economy, where the government mandates what is to be done.

> If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed.

I agree.

But I'm not convinced by the next paragraph. You present it as if it were a matter of 0 or 1. But I don't see any good reason why taxation shouldn't be used to make adjustments without immediately collapsing the entire incentive structure for investment. Less profit is still profit. If this argument were valid, there would be no large industries in countries that tax companies more heavily than the US.

No country which I am aware of taxes companies for reinvesting profit and for growing. On the contrary, some countries instead give tax breaks to industries if they are large enough. And these are socialist countries.

Thinking about how incredibly many factors have to come together right for a giant business or industry of any kind to be able to exist, I understand that governments are very careful to not poke them with too many sticks. Their products and services exports (and imports) are an incredibly valuable bargaining chip in foreign politics. The only other significant bargaining chip which nations usually have are military threats, and that isn't a pleasant road to travel.

Yes, I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you: promoting growth and reinvestment are essential parts of a functioning economic and industrial policy. But that doesn't mean we have to tolerate massive and harmful wealth inequality, or that the only alternative is an aggressive foreign policy. I mean, what is the implication here? “Leave the super-rich alone, otherwise the economy will collapse like a soufflé if we don't go to war instead”? If that is the final conclusion of economic competence, then everything is going down the drain anyway.

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