Article from The Sun today:
“Angry MPs urge Brits to boycott Amazon as it’s revealed the online giant’s UK tax bill HALVED last year – while sales soared. Politicians and campaigners rounded on the US giant for coughing up ‘peanuts’ to the Taxman despite raking in £1.4 billion.”
Today’s enlightened, individual mind commentary: Brit Gov Officials want to boycott Amazon as an extortion tactic for more tax payments. They apparently want AMZN to pay taxes on their revenues of £1.4 billion, while the competitive, low margin retail business only profited £24.5 million. Gov wants more than the £7.4 million paid in corporate taxes,… and the estimated 24,000 jobs it has and will create in the country. AMZN “isn’t paying its fair share!”
Regardless of actual profits and payments, that is always the mantra of statist apologists – everybody paying their fair share, turning over their property and income and choice and lives. I really don’t care much about people and companies paying their fair share. I am much more disturbed by people and governments that take more than their fair share of other people’s time, product, property; that take more than their fair share of lives lost in endless war and people kidnapped in a prison cell for non-violent “crimes;” their fair share of intimidation and manipulation and threats and extortion and lies and fraud and waste and controls and abuse and dogs shot and civil assets confiscated without trial and failed public education and corporatist favoritism which drives out competition and the fair markets upon which an open and free economy depend.
They take more than their fair share of causing distorted economics and the resultant unintended consequences, of manipulating interest rates to near zero with all of the subsequent artificially driven debt purchasing into the credit and valuations bubbles which will inevitably burst – once again harming the general public but sparing the most irresponsible who tend to be bailed out with public funds and protected by the powerful; more than their fair share of failing those who have made themselves dependent on the promises of the ultimately undeliverable – politically provided health, Ponzi pensions, unfunded entitlement liabilities, poverty programs, education, jobs, safety, security, peace; more than their fair share of supporting heroin growers in Afghanistan via trillion dollar soldier- and society-destroying military ventures which aid the ongoing deadly and recently much-advertised “opioid crisis” back home and lead to jailing or shooting the well-provisioned end user and dealer in the US; of never-ending global interventions which lead to violent blow back from people that hate the destabilizing aggressions and drone bombs and political interferences and resource extractions in their countries and lives; more than their fair share of manipulating news media with its incessant stream of inanity and manufactured crises and personality disorders writ large that turn the viewership’s minds to malleable mush – the ideal fertile ground to grow the nationalist, myth-based, emotionally reactive, and mis-informed mental garbage piles from which important decisions are made at the ballot box.
Indeed, you should be very worried about fair shares. However, I argue that the takers of others’ fair shares are those that should be critiqued and constrained, rather than those taken from.