Should You Praise Or Condemn Burger King For Its Decision?

Burger King Teaches Statists About The Power Of The Free Market

August 27, 2014 by Bob Livingston 

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Big government statists eschew the power of the free market. Without government regulation of business, they’ll tell you, there would be large business monopolies. Never mind that there never has been a monopoly that did not become so without government interference in the marketplace.

Following Burger King Worldwide’s announcement that it would acquire Ontario-based Tim Hortons — a coffee and doughnut chain — and move the new company’s headquarters to Canada in order to take advantage of that country’s lower corporate tax rate, we learned a little more about the hypocrisy of big government statists.

First, the deal is being largely financed by Warren Buffett. Buffet, you may recall, is Barack Obama’s poster child for the White House’s “tax fairness” campaign. Back in 2011, Obama proposed the adoption of a “Buffett Rule” that would prohibit wealthy Americans from claiming the tax breaks and deductions provided them under current IRS law. The Buffett Rule would require millionaires to pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent. On the White House’s website we learn that the Buffett Rule is “a simple principle of tax fairness that asks everyone to pay their fair share.”

“Fair share” is one of the favorite code words of the elites, though no one can explain what “fair share” means. And although the elites want to make sure you pay your fair share, they don’t hesitate to take advantage of any and all loopholes granted them — as in Obama hasinvestments in the Cayman Islands.

In order to ensure corporations like Burger King pay their “fair share,” statist Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) repeated his call for a global minimum tax rate. Sherrod wants to lower the U.S. corporate tax rate (a great idea) but establish a global minimum tax rate (a very bad one).

Why is it a bad one? It is an attack on the free market and another step toward One World Government.

It’s natural for companies (and people) to want to keep what they earn. If one country offers a lower tax rate, that incentivizes companies to move there. Rather than establish a global minimum tax rate, the U.S. should lower (or eliminate) its corporate tax rate to make it competitive so that American firms will return and foreign companies will want to move their headquarters here.

That will create jobs grow the economy far better than any gimmicky “tax fairness” initiatives will.

But statists don’t appreciate realistic economic lessons, so they’ve pulled out their long knives. Sherrod is leading the call to boycott Burger King because trying to keep what you earn has somehow become unpatriotic.

What’s truly unpatriotic is advocating collectivism, confiscatory taxes and One World Government.

And if you want to boycott Burger King, do it because its so-called food is bad for you, not because it wants to keep the money it makes.