A corporate tax is legally paid by a corporation, but a corporation is not a person standing apart from society with an independent capacity to bear economic pain. A firm is a network of workers, owners, consumers, suppliers, and investments. When government taxes corporate profits, the legal liability may appear on the company’s tax return, but the economic burden can be distributed through lower returns to owners, weaker investment, lower wages, fewer jobs, or higher prices. This is why corporate taxation is not a technical argument about whether one sympathizes with “business.” It is a question about capital formation and, ultimately, about the opportunities available to ordinary people.
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Why Western Europe Is Falling Behind: Welfare States, Interventionism, and the Loss of Economic Vitality
To say that Western Europe is “poor” would be inaccurate and intellectually dishonest. Compared with developing countries, Western Europe remains wealthy. But that is not the correct benchmark. The real question is whether Western Europe has reached the level of dynamism, innovation, and economic vitality that its history, institutions, and human capital should allow. On this standard, the answer is increasingly no.
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