With Loyalty Oath Demand, Crusade Against Corporate Inversion Gets Even Creepier

Leave it to Jonathan Alter to
jump the already laughably overblown “problem” of corporations
seeking friendlier tax jurisdictions elsewhere right past parody.
Forget any discussion of why businesses are relocating. At the
Daily Beast, Alter wants potential “corporate deserters” to
take…wait, I have to check this again…yep…loyalty
oaths.

And you though the whole Benito-tastic flag-draping thing
already jumped the shark when President Obama
demanded “an economic patriotism that says we rise or fall
together, as one nation, and as one people.”

Must…resist…the…urge…to…include…Italian…and…German…quotes.

Yes, it’s true. Jonathan Alter went there. In response to the
dread specter of “inversion”—U.S. corporations merging with
overseas firms in order to
escape high corporate tax rates, daunting bureaucracy, and a regime
that taxes worldwide profits, unlike other G-7 countries—Alter
says that reforming our tax system to make it competitive just
isn’t good enough. Instead, Americans, and the government in
particular, should pressure corporate executives to sign promises
that they won’t take their businesses out of the country.

Even if comprehensive tax reform miraculously passes, it
wouldn’t reduce the corporate tax rate enough to stop the
desertions. That’s because other countries have slashed their
corporate taxes or eliminated them altogether.

So it’s time for red-blooded Americans to take matters into our
own hands. My answer is to make every corporation sign
something.

Sign what? If Republicans cared about this issue, which most
don’t, they would revive McCarthy-era loyalty oaths, where people
were forced to swear that they weren’t communists.

Ummm…That paragraph struck him as a good
idea? Apparently so. Anyway, how does that work?

For those companies less able to act as Americans or recognize
their real interests, there are two ways to make this work. The
president should issue an executive order that says any company
that wants to keep its federal contracts must sign a new-fangled
[non-desertion agreement]…

But other companies with few or no federal contracts might be
tempted to desert anyway.

That’s where the rest of us come in. Under my scheme, companies
that sign non-desertion agreements would embed a tiny American flag
or some other Good Housekeeping-type seal in their corporate
insignia for all to see, just as companies during the Great
Depression that agreed to Franklin Roosevelt’s recovery plan hung
an emblem of a blue eagle in their windows with the legend, “We Do
Our Part.”

German historian
Wolfgang Schivelbusch and occasional Reason
contributor
Thaddeus Russell are among those who have directly connected
the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration, and its blue
eagle, to fascism. Which is to say, this whole “economic
patriotism” crusade starts at a bad place and spirals down into a
cesspool. So, if that’s the model you work from…

To make it clear where this all goes, the National Recovery
Administration once boasted, “The Fascist Principles are very
similar to those we have been evolving here in America.” Its head,
Hugh Johnson, noted about the adoption or rejection of the blue
eagle symbol and its code, “Those who are not with us are against
us.”

Or you could just go with, “we rise or fall together, as one
nation, and as one people.”

As I’ve noted before, the United States is not especially
competitive in terms of corporate tax rates, scope of business
taxation, or ease of negotiating tax bureaucracy. On PriceWaterhouseCooper’s
study of “189 economies worldwide, ranking them according to
the relative ease of paying taxes,” Ireland ranked six, Canada
ranked eight, the U.S. came in at 64.

So…Maybe fewer loyalty oaths and more making the tax system
less sucky? Just a thought.