No one designed the environment to be destroyed. But tax laws are often designed precisely to incentivize people to behave in a certain way. If we raise taxes on cigarettes, and then people smoke less, and tax revenue goes down, does anyone complain? Of course not; that's why we raised taxes on cigarettes.
Now sometimes you have tax laws that are poorly designed, where we don't like what happens when people follow the incentives they create. Or other times you have tax laws where people debated about what things to incentivize, and one side won the debate, and you might be on the other side. It's perfectly fair to want to change them. But it doesn't really make sense to criticize people for responding to incentives per se.
If you find a legal loophole that lets you steal cars and subsequently take advantage of it to steal cars then you are still a car thief, still a bad person, and the theft is still newsworthy. The fact that your were "merely following incentives" does not make it right and does not make it uninteresting. Quite the opposite.
You're even more culpable if it is later discovered that you lobbied for the loophole.
Society's reaction should be to disseminate the surprising story and use it to drum up support to fix the law. At that point, the only reason to not pursue the matter further is to serve the higher principle of avoiding ex post facto legislation. It's an important principle, so we allow the crime to go unpunished, but the morality of the situation is still that the theft was wrong.
That is more one type of tax, being punitive taxes. Laws used in tax avoidance are generally designed to make things easier. The flaw isn't usually in the host country (the US is sort of an exception), but more a feature in the tax haven. A simplistic version would be that you say "we shouldn't pay tax here, but there" and then you don't pay much tax there either, because the tax haven is in on it. But you can argue that there are many parties also in the host country who are just as in on it. There are just plenty of people who support that powerful people shouldn't pay much tax, and sometimes they manage to convince everyone else.
But overall you can't really stop anyone doing almost anything. If people don't want large companies to pay taxes, or favor property values instead of building more housing, or reward working in finance instead of engineering so be it. Just don't come and complain a few decades later when everyone is greedy and things are falling apart. Because if moving money around is the way to make money successful companies are going to be just as good at that as anything else.
> If we raise taxes on cigarettes, and then people smoke less, and tax revenue goes down, does anyone complain? Of course not; that's why we raised taxes on cigarettes.
In this exact scenario, people complain all the time. They start talking about how we need to raise other taxes to make up for the new shortfall in cigarette-related revenue.
> No one designed the environment to be destroyed. But tax laws are often designed precisely to incentivize people to behave in a certain way. If we raise taxes on cigarettes, and then people smoke less, and tax revenue goes down, does anyone complain? Of course not; that's why we raised taxes on cigarettes.
Ah yes a terrible example for the argument you're trying to make. In NYC bodega's sell cigarette "illegally" imported from VA. It doesn't and hasn't stopped people from smoking, at all. It's a vanity bill. Also, it helps generate revenue because most people from outside of the city won't have a bodega that will sell them untaxed cigs, which is always the easiest way to pass taxes, have a non-local pay them. Does government run lotto help stop gambling? No, they just want a piece of the pie.
In general, the average income tax law (the basic stuff) isn't poorly designed, its just under enforced and the extra tax law makes the rest very difficult to work with. Right now, what is poorly designed in tax code is the effect of increased globalization, software and international tax treaties/law.
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Also, not paying your taxes when you're using government benefits should be criticized, 100%. For example, Walmart formerly not paying a living wage and making the tax payers support some of their employees, while the founders kids are all billionaires, is totally broken.
Raising taxes on cigarettes or liquor with the intent of influencing behavior is big brother BS. If however you're doing it to pay for the future health care costs that smoking incurs I'm all for it (if the health care system is public).
The whole "nudge" practice because nosy people want to decide what's best for others drives me nuts.
Now sometimes you have tax laws that are poorly designed, where we don't like what happens when people follow the incentives they create. Or other times you have tax laws where people debated about what things to incentivize, and one side won the debate, and you might be on the other side. It's perfectly fair to want to change them. But it doesn't really make sense to criticize people for responding to incentives per se.