Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes

That is oversimplifying. Would it have been wrong to avoid paying taxes to the Nazis, or the Stalinists, or the Maoists, or the Khmer Rouge?

You are implicitly incorporating the morality of supporting an unspecified government into business behavior.

If you believe that, on balance, expenditures by the US government of tax-derived revenues produces more harm in the world than good, you would therefore consider it a moral virtue to legally and lawfully minimize the amount of taxes delivered to the IRS. If you believe that expenditures by the US government of tax-derived revenues do more good than otherwise, then you would consider tax avoidance to be morally wrong. But then you also have to consider whether a corporation has a greater moral obligation to maximize value for its shareholders, or to pursue a specific purpose as stated in its charter. In either case, the corporation should seek to retain as much control over the disposition of its revenues as is possible.

In your "legal murder" hypothetical, I would consider it both moral and ironic to murder the person responsible for creating the legal murder loophole, along with any other person that has ever used it. I might still refrain, as that means I would be losing some of my morality-based protections against being murdered, with the knowledge that my legal protections are already nonexistent in loophole-compliant circumstances.

But I am a natural intelligence with moral agency. A corporation is an artificial intelligence, programmed by bug-ridden legal documents, and its program executed by its lawyers and C-level principals. It isn't a paperclip optimizer, but it is a banknote optimizer. It has no moral values that humans can readily recognize. It isn't a psychopath or sociopath; it's just alien. In order for a corporation to exhibit moral behavior, the morality has to be included in its programming. That's difficult. It is much easier to incorporate by reference the entire body of public law, and then allow the corporation to pursue "any lawful purpose". And tax avoidance, aside from moral considerations, is still "lawful".

If you look at the histories of many politicians, you see them making honest efforts to represent their people... in the beginning of their careers.

A major problem is that there's so much money in campaigns that in order to get enough money to compete, a politician must make deals with donors. Often these donors are small groups of high wealth individuals or industries.

Now the politician is effectively in the pocket of the monied interests, or else they are out of government cone next election cycle.

Until campaigns are equally financed by "the people", the results will not have a chance of being representative of what the people want.

But ironically, to make that change would require the current government to take action that most of the big industries do not want. Thus, it will not happen.

Better yet - campaign finance reform: https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Version-Lawrence-Lessig...

I think there are good people that want to serve, but they have to play the money game to survive (costs millions/billions to get elected?? What?!). Which eventually corrupts them ...

Term limits might be nice too.

> The same applies to tax avoidance. It might be legal but it's still wrong.

how is a company supposed to determine the morally correct amount of taxes?

if they hire incompetent accountants who pay excess taxes, are they more moral?

I can't access the article or the cache but here is Netflix's latest annual filing at the SEC https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1065280&a...

They made 1.2 billion in 2018 income before taxes compared to 485 million last year.

The corporate tax rate was brought down from 35% to 21% in 2018. So they should have paid 257 million in Federal, 33.6 in State and 63 million in foreign taxes

With the Federal and California R&D tax credits (140.7 million) and tax benefits on stock based compensation (191 million) and other odds and ends they brought it down to 15 million for an effective 1% tax rate. "In 2018, the difference between our 1% effective tax rate and the Federal statutory rate of 21% was primarily due to the recognition of excess tax benefits of stock-based compensation, Federal and California research and development credits (“R&D”), and updated adjustments related to U.S. tax reform as a result of the U.S. federal tax return filing, partially offset by state taxes, foreign taxes, non-deductible expenses and the international provisions from the U.S. tax reform enacted in December 2017."

Netflix has also deferred tax assets - easiest to think of as tax prepaid but could also include taxes paid to foreign countries, losses from previous years, etc.) of 689 million. So they counted the taxes against it.

In the cash flow stateemnt the supplemental disclosure is 131,069 for Income taxes paid. So there was actual cash tax payments made.