Employees of Apple “should be humiliated and ashamed” because of the iPhone company’s “clearly sleazy” decision to minimize its corporate taxes, New York Times columnist David Brooks claims.
“The Apple corporation exists because of American institutions,” Brooks writes, complaining that “Apple parked its intellectual property in an Irish subsidiary so it could avoid paying taxes in America and support those institutions. It saved $9 billion in 2012 alone.”
The Times columnist complains that Apple “stiffed its own country.”
“We turned off the moral lens,” Brooks complains, contending that “remoralizing…the market is the great project of the moment.”
Brooks doesn’t so much argue that Apple’s behavior is immoral as he does assert it, hurling tendentious language—”clearly sleazy,” “ashamed,” “stiffed”—without spelling out the reasoning behind this “moral” system that requires a corporate management to pay higher taxes than legally required.
It’s not immediately obvious that it would have been more moral for Apple voluntarily to have paid $9 billion more in U.S. taxes in 2012. In that case, the $9 billion would have been available for politicians in Washington to spend. Some portion of it would probably have been wasted. Instead, Apple was able to use the money for other purposes—compensating employees, investing in the growth and development of its business, and creating value for shareholders and customers, writes Ira Stoll.
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