Capitalist Tools (Continued)

Unable or unwilling to respond to my argument that large global corporations are now playing nations off against one another in a race to the bottom over taxes, subsidies, and regulations – and that large nations (and national groups like the European Union) should gain countervailing bargaining power by conditioning access to their markets on responsible corporate behavior – Forbes chooses instead to distort what I originally wrote.

Its columnist seeks to calculate the so-called “consumer surplus” from the sale of Apple goods in the U.S. – ignoring any social costs inherent in tax avoidance and the tax-avoidance industry that’s grown up around it, including the incentives generated by Apple for every other major global firm to decide for itself how much tax it is going to pay in the U.S. and elsewhere – and then concludes that “Professor Reich’s argument is that we should wipe out, by banning the sale of Apple’s goods in the US, that $1 trillion of consumer surplus in order to overcome that social harm of the $10 billion not paid in tax.”

Reductio ad absurdum.