Have It Your Way, or the Federal Government’s

On those rare occasions when we resort to fast food we’ll sometimes drop by a Burger King. There’s one nearby, and although it’s on a shady strip of North Broadway the drive-through service is usually prompt and the food is a more or less fair trade for the meager amount of money being charged, especially by the standards of two o’clock in the morning in our early-to-bed town, and we don’t always insist on gourmet fare. Now that Burger King is becoming Canadian we’ll probably be expected to boycott the chain, but we won’t willingly forgo those greasy burgers and salty fries for any political reasons.

According to news reports the Burger King company is purchasing a controlling share of the Tim Horton’s chain of coffee and donut stores in Canada in order to reincorporate itself as a Canadian entity, which means it will be paying a cumulative corporate income tax rate of slightly more than 26 percent rather than the world-decor 40 percent that the federal and state and local governments take here in the United States. This strikes us as a sound business move, and a good way to keep those Whoppers and fries affordable and the pimply-faced fellows at the drive-through windows employed, but the left is already denouncing the chain for its lack of “economic patriotism.” So far as we understand the concept, it means that when companies respond to the economic incentives that the federal government has created according to a rational self-interest rather than the way the government would prefer it is somehow the company’s fault rather than the government’s. This hardly seems a good reason not to have our burgers our way, which involves lots of mustard and no ketchup or mayonnaise and little regard for the tax liabilities of the burger chain.

America’s high corporate tax rates have been driving an increasing number of American corporations to friendlier shores in recent years, including most of the country’s former pharmaceutical giants, and the administration’s response has been to ratchet up the attacks on those companies’ reputations. This does nothing to increase the revenues to the federal government, of course, but it seems to make the administration happy. A better idea would be to make America’s tax code competitive with such countries as a Canada, which would almost certain provide the feds more money to spend on punitive corporation regulations and any other nonsense they might come up with, but that would be good for corporations and thus anathema to the modern left.

If you’ve seen any movies from the big-time and tax-coddled Hollywood movie studios lately you already know how much the left hates those dastardly corporations, which are supposedly so evil that they substituted for the International Communist Conspiracy in a remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” a few years ago. The left’s more idealistic sorts are constantly sending out anti-corporate messages on Facebook over their Apple computers while driving their General Motors hybrid cars to the local Starbucks, usually with money they’ve been paid by some profit-driven corporation, and they always seem surprised that while their war on corporations is going so well the economy doesn’t seem to be gaining any steam. They’ll definitely be boycotting Burger King, which will probably provide the next villain for the next bit action-adventure epic starring some muscle-bound Hollywood leftist, but at least we won’t have to sit behind them in line at the franchise at North Broadway.

— Bud Norman