[LMB] Thor Power Tools, yet again

[Peter Newman]

D Echelbarger <bujoldjunkie at tds.net> wrote

> Ed Burkhead wrote:
>> But my bookstore owner just thought the tax law had changed. 


> Put bluntly, until the Thor Powertools provision, publishers 
> were double-dipping.
> The Supreme Court ruled that they couldn't get the tax 
> write-off unless they'd actually disposed of the inventory 
> they were writing off.

>> The downside is that,publishers seem to have changed their warehousing
>> behavior for backlist book.
> 
> Yes, but it's not because of an Evil Government Plot. It's 
> because they're too greedy to be willing to hold those books 
> in inventory when they can get a quick tax break by dumping 
> them.

They're in business to make money, they're _supposed_ to
be greedy. [1]

They make their decisions based on the tax laws available to
them. If business taxes were less than they would act 
differently. If all businesses are owned by people, and all
people are taxed than you just tax the people according to how
much of the business they own, forget taxing the business.
There are a lot of different tax policies you could set up
to do this. I'd get rid of the whole notion of that corporations
are people first. Corporations ought not to be legally considered
people. Corporations ought to be legally considered things that
people own. My car isn't a person it is a thing I own. Why can
I start a company and have it be 'a person' but my other things
can't be people? Is creating a corporation like giving birth
to a child? Can corporations (not employees of corporations)
think. Why do they get the rights of sentience when they're not
sentient?

I suspect that talking about US tax policy could very
rapidly become talking about US politics, which we try hard
to avoid, so I'm trying to keep this more of a political
philosophy question than a practical question. Besides the
practical answer to why they have power is that they were able
to take it, so we don't need to discuss that much.

[1] In fact they even have a legal duty, at least in the USA,
to their stockholders to be 'greedy' in the 'Do your best to
make money' sense of the term. They're also supposed to be 
ethical enough not to hurt people because of that greed - but 
that's more of a 'Don't pollute' not hurt than a normative duty 
to help. Even though I might like it if more old books were in 
print so that I didn't have to search hard (or pay shipping) for 
the first one in the series when I discover the series only with the
third book the publisher does not have a normative duty to keep 
the early books in print for my convenience.

--
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul instructed them to send
ten copies to the Thessalonians and the Ephesians.  But the
Ephesians broke the chain, and were punished by the LORD ...

Peter Newman         pnewman at gci.net