The thing is non-harmonization doesn't really promote experimentation, it promotes competitive-market-leading behavior. Obviously there are limits to how much it matters - lots more startups in CA compared to South Dakota. But I don't think there's a lot of evidence that non-harmonization provides an incentive to experiment, so much as it makes countries have economic incentives to treat things like a zero sum game.

Without collective agreements between governing bodies on what bare minimum standards should be on taxation what we see is rent seeking behavior from corporations (ah la Foxconn and Mount Pleasant, Amazon HQ 2).

Without minimum taxation, we see a race to the bottom for taxation, where elites benefit and everyone else looses.

By "elites" do you mean the people living in the countries or states that attract capital? Ireland's standard of living has increased dramatically because they adopted low taxation regime. It's ridiculous to pretend that forcing countries that don't have much in the way of resources or infrastructure to adopt higher taxes somehow helps them. This might help the U.S. or Germany keep companies "in house" but it certainly does not help Ireland or similar countries.

This argument is subtly interesting, as it lays bare how regulatory capture of the tax system by corporations has caused unexpected consequences and externalities, and how efforts seeking to even the playing field for smaller corporations and countries ironically benefits those best able to navigate increased regulatory hurdles and scrutiny and higher tax burdens - the status quo elite corporations.

I’m reminded of the (conspiracy?) theory that the recent Facebook whistleblower is a controlled opposition operative who deliberately seeks to increase the regularly burden on Facebook and other social media sites, because Facebook will benefit overall compared to smaller corporations who are not able to iterate and adapt as well.

Is this new tax plan comparable to regulatory capture by large multinational corporations? If so, how does it deal with these concerns?

This is experimentation in governance. What better way to encourage that than to provide an illustration as these 136 countries are doing?

I think you're in need of some further reading.

1) UN resolutions don't have any enforcement weight, which is why they're so popular with politicians who run on the statement "nothing will fundamentally change."

2) Taxes should be paid by whoever retains earnings, and in that case corporate taxes make a lot of sense. And yes, buying back your own shares to drive share values higher for current shareholders is "retaining earnings" and should be taxed at not just capital gains, but individual income levels since individual income is what such activity creates.

On #2: Buying back shares does not create individual income. It only creates temporary unrealized gains. Only if those individual shareholders sell, do they realize the gains and, in some cases, will they be taxed on it at income tax rates.

Wrong.

That money is rendered worthless from an economic perspective. In a healthy economy the profits of corporations are spent on more facilities, more suppliers, more employees, who all in turn spend their profits on the same.

We don't have a healthy economy. We have corporations that lose money every single day of their entire existence, but manage to drive their share prices by tax scams, accounting fraud, government subsidies, and share buybacks financed with debt the would not be available to them but for the existence of the scams, frauds, and government subsidies.

In that sense these corporations do not do anything of value, they are merely ephemeral structures to facilitate tax and investment risk avoidance for a certain class of people, at the expense of a tax base they do not participate in so should logically be shut out of.

When a corporation uses that money to buy back shares the money is effectively destroyed by being circulated among a financial class that has (mostly) bribed their way out of the tax system.

Hence, any money used for share buybacks should logically be treated as net income for the company in question's next filing.

> In a healthy economy the profits of corporations are spent on more facilities, more suppliers, more employees, who all in turn spend their profits on the same.

Only if those investments will create more profit. If capital cannot be allocated effectively (i.e. a company that returns $1 for every extra dollar invested above current ability) then the profit should be returned to the shareholders.

> We have corporations that lose money every single day of their entire existence, but manage to drive their share prices by tax scams, accounting fraud, government subsidies, and share buybacks financed with debt the would not be available to them but for the existence of the scams, frauds, and government subsidies.

Sure there are companies like this.

> at the expense of a tax base they do not participate in so should logically be shut out of.

I mean, you shouldn't pay taxes if you lose money... Shareholders/employees still pay taxes here.

> When a corporation uses that money to buy back shares the money is effectively destroyed by being circulated among a financial class that has (mostly) bribed their way out of the tax system.

Say we have 100 shares of a company. The company makes $100 per year. Each of those shares own $1 per year of the company. If they company pays $50 to buy back 50 shares then each of the remaining shares owns $2 of that $100. I mean, the market still decides what the stocks are worth, but eventually most if not all stocks get valued fairly. How is the money being destroyed?

Again, if the company cannot invest the money profitably to make more money, it should return it to the owners of the company. Are you against private ownership?

> Hence, any money used for share buybacks should logically be treated as net income for the company in question's next filing.

Why?

Sure. Let's try an experiment where all countries agree to a minimum tax rate, and see what that does.

We've tried race-to-the-bottom. We've tried penalize-till-we-get-hitler. We've tried tickle-down. We've tried fascism-masquerading-as-communism. Let's try globally coordinated minimum tax!