> Multinational corporations commonly avoid taxes by keeping profits offshore in a low tax jurisdiction.
That does happen, but many including the biggest tech companies found a clever way around it. Via a combination of ultra-low interest bearing bond sales and share repurchases. It does the same thing but avoids those taxes. So there's no incentive for profit retention on net.
> COVID-19 isn't a rainy day, it's a once in a century pandemic.
Part of going into business is accepting risk, including systemic risk. That's why the corporate veil exists and it's generally positive for the overall economy when weak businesses fail. A strong business would have an operating model that can withstand such risk.
> To expect companies to have saved enough money to survive rare systemic events without that is to penalize and destroy any company lean enough to have been unable to save it to begin with.
Maybe those companies shouldn't have been in business then and that capital would have been better deployed somewhere else. I'm surprised that opportunity costs of capital allocation are ignored when defending bailouts. They introduce market inefficiency and reward complacency.
> Making a worse product in a competitive market has a strong relationship with going out of business.
In principle, yes. In reality, most markets are not competitive to that degree. Perfectly competitive markets don't exist in a modern regulated economy. We can talk about removing regulatory burden to make this true, but that's not where we are now.