alt Hacker NewsYou write: > The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.
But I think the author of the comment you were replying to had a different goal in mind. I think their goal was "prevent corporations from getting too big".
We can and should debate whether that is a goal we should be trying to achieve, but if it is then progressive taxation for companies might be a way to achieve it.
We might presume that was the goal, yet it wasn't explicitly stated. And many have a goal of generic wealth redistribution, and will inject such into any conversation about large companies.
One might note the unrestrained concern about fluid capital acquisition, in the post I replied to. It's not having billions in infrastructure that was cited, nor having a large number of employees, both metrics of size, but instead having fluid, unused capital.
If we wish to constrain upon size, there needs to be nuance, conjoined with the specific industry, and even sub-industry. Some capital equipment costs can be enormous. Should we work to prevent financing such via stored profit? Should we work to force companies to finance, then pay off, just to feed the banks, rather than store and then spend?
Should we tax so that "big ideas" may never occur?
I think far more would be gained by ensuring taxation just stays fair between smaller and larger company structures. There's a lot of book-keeping that can be done as a large company, to hide profits, that cannot be done when you're a small mom and pop.