Re: go away if governments stopped leeching
I may have a simplistic understanding of taxation here.
One has to accept that taxation is a certainty. There are costs associated with provision for a society or a nation. Be that providing national defence, policing, a legislative system, education, infrastructure, social security, health etc etc. The concept of paying at the point of use for everything seems to be the capitalist nirvana, but is totally unrealistic. They are all very happy to exploit loopholes in taxation law without paying towards the legislative structure that provides that law. At the same time, they believe they enjoy the legal protection of, say, intellectual property and will defend it using a judicial system that relies on the tax that they avoid paying! They simply cannot have it one way without the other just because it might suit them. Companies and individuals agree to abide by law because it offers them opportunity and protection, theoretically on a level playing field. Anything else and we would descend into an anarchy. If Google gets ripped off by Amazon in a business deal, what are they going to do without a common legislative recourse? Send in self-driving tanks to take on Amazon's drone army?
The modes of taxation that have evolved over the years are taxation on income, taxation on property and taxation on activity. There are equivalents for individuals and companies / businesses. This seems to allow for capturing a portion of all fiduciary streams and tends to balance the income stream for government across the entire user base.
The current "complaint" about international companies relates to their avoidance of paying a due proportion of the governmental revenue stream. There's a very clear moral duty to pay tax - it seems to me at least. There's an ongoing philosophical debate about morality in law, from the natural law proponents that say law arises from universal moral concepts (fairness for example), through legal positivism that calls for a complete separation of morality from law in the same way that the church is separate from the state, to realism which states that the law is as how it is practiced, criticalism which posits that the law is a tool designed to operate for the benefit of the most powerful group, and many other camps. Of course, it seems that the law is no pure strain of any of these schools. There has to be an element of reality in these theories in order for them to be even an inch of the starting block in any debate. If I said that the law is a banana, or a small moustachioed Bolivian traffic warden, or the dictate of noble alien lizard rulers imposed by mass psionic influence delivered from a base in the Sea of Tranquility, then I wouldn't even get past the end of the opening argument.
If, therefore, we accept that fair taxation across the board is a requirement for a healthy civilisation, then we need to look carefully at how to achieve this, how the systems that have grown organically today are failing to achieve this, what are the good points of what we are currently doing, and then sort it out once and for all. Preferably in a way that's simple enough for everyone to understand without parasitic teams of legal wranglers looking for loopholes and efficiencies and dodges etc. Because they're blood sucking insects of such low moral character that a psychotic wasp looks like Mother Theresa by comparison.