I think you can very safely generalize this to "people are always in favor of more benefits for themselves that they don't have to pay for".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Case_la...

Frankly, if OP doesn’t want me to anthropomorphize corporations for tax purposes, they’ll need to go back in time and stop the courts from anthropomorphizing them for various rights.

If a company gets 1A rights under citizens united, then it can have tax obligations as well.

I’m pretty over this double standard where companies are handed various rights, but not commensurate obligations.

"I work hard and pay my taxes, Ford makes billions and pay much less tax!"

But Ford is an abstract entity that is not a person and doesn't have a better life than you.

All those billions are eventually paid to living humans, who do pay taxes on that income.

This is the economist perspective, but it requires a level of analysis not compatible with rage.

If you say: we’ll only collect taxes from the individuals that are paid by Microsoft, instead of taxing Microsoft, that’s fine by me. But, I would then say that Microsoft also doesn’t have free speech rights as a corporation, after all each individual in the corporation has free speech rights.

If we decide that a corporation *is* entitled to some rights granted to people (such as a right to free speech), then the corporation should also be subject to taxation, separately from all the individuals that compromise it.

I’m unwilling to give one without the other. If a company want rights, it should have obligations. If it has obligations, then the company should have rights.

Linking taxation and free speech, among all possible rights and obligations, does seem completely arbitrary though.

Well, it was completely arbitrary as it's serving as an example. I'm not saying my policy would literally be X Taxes and Citizens United, just using each as an example of the general class of things that I think should be linked.

I've seen corporate personhood used aggressively to argue that corporations should have more rights, but then when we're in a tax policy discussion, suddenly we are squeamish about anthropomorphizing corporations. My argument is that the amount that we anthropomorphize corporations should be equal whether our discussion is about rights (with free speech as one example) or about obligations (with taxation as one such example)

Instead of writing separate but very similar laws for personal and corporate property, you say that the law is the same for both cases, aside for a few exceptions.