Tax -the fees for participating in society

My more regular readers will find this somewhat familiar: I almost felt like the author must have read a previous blog post or two (like this or this one and even perhaps this one and for a bit of a wider perspective try this) of mine:

Taxes allow the chancellor to fund an infrastructure from which every citizen, rich or poor, benefits. This includes the shoppers at Topshop, owned by Philip Green. Green avoids paying huge sums of tax in Britain by registering his company in the name of his Monaco-based wife, Tina. The government seemed relaxed about those arrangements when they invited Green to advise on how to cut public spending. The message sent out was: it's acceptable to avoid paying taxes in Britain, even when you live here and benefit from the legal, physical and cultural infrastructure that those taxes support.

Indeed I have favoured the idea of thinking of taxes as a kind of subscription: if you want access to the markets and labour and capital of our society, you participate and contribute appropriately and don't try to rip us off. We should call time on freeloading TNC's and their execs who don't stand their round in society.

As the article goes on to say (with emphasis placed by myself):

Google, employing 33,000 around the world, demonstrated even more clearly that this is "a golden age for capital". In the first three months of this year it made a $3bn profit. Google can domicile its profits not in each country in which it trades but wherever, in more than 100 territories, the taxes are least onerous. These arrangements are in place at the same time as many multinationals are shedding proper care of employees in regard to health, pensions and employment rights – leaving governments and taxpayers to pick up the bill. That is morally, economically and socially wrong.

Tax: share the burden fairly or anger will grow | Observer editorial | Comment is free | The Observer