>Foxconn wasn't build as a subsidiary of Apple. Not sure what you're getting at with that. Yes, I understand the technicalities, but if it didn't happen that way and the intent of how it happens is the way it is, arguing the permutations is a strawman.

It isn't a strawman because if you change the rules to make it matter whether one company is a subsidiary of another, they'll just rearrange things so that they aren't. Nothing says Apple Ireland can't be the sole entity the Apple shareholders own, which licenses and sells its products to independent distributors in the United States which Apple Ireland controls under contract, and contracts with other independent U.S. companies to design its products. These companies would then be independent at least to the extent Foxconn is but would have no power (and thus tiny margins) because Apple is the one with the copyrights, the brand and the pile of cash, and they could easily replace those components of their supply chain with competing independent corporations and still hire from the same employee pool and sell to the same customers. Because you're trying to tax profit, which is mobile, instead of the actual things your jurisdiction offers, like a skilled labor force or a large customer base.

>Yes and no. Those government services are not corporate profit, sure. But they are what makes the Apple corporation possible in the first place. Apple wasn't founded in Ireland, the Netherlands and certainly not on the Cayman Islands. The "thank you" payment for that is called taxes.

You keep talking about morality. What law do you propose to cause this to happen? Or are you expecting it to just happen voluntarily if you ask nicely enough?

>All laws have to assume to a varying extent that people are interested in the society they live in. Because if they aren't, no law whatsoever is going to make them a good member of society.

If they aren't then the right law will either change their behavior or put them in prison.

>Funny, because to me it seems that no matter what you tax, people who don't want to pay taxes will either seek and find or invest and create a way around that.

Nonsense. Unless a company is willing to stop owning property or employing workers or selling to customers in your jurisdiction, they can't avoid property tax, payroll tax or sales tax. The problem with taxing "profit" is that they can keep doing everything they were doing before and just shuffle some papers around so that the subsidiary in a low tax jurisdiction is the one making all the money. That's just the nature of profit -- it isn't like a building or an employee or a customer that actually physically exists somewhere.

You're talking about culture and civil responsibility in the context of corporations that compete with one another. A corporation that pays a significant portion of its profits in taxes that it isn't legally obligated to and that its competitors are not doing is going to be at a serious disadvantage.

Simple math. Two competitors each make 20% of their market cap in profit every year and reinvest it. One of them pays no tax, the other pays 40%, so that it grows at 12% instead of 20%. In two decades the company paying no tax is ~38 times bigger, the company paying tax is ~10 times bigger. If they each started out the same size, the company paying no tax will now have ~4 times the cash reserves, which means the company paying taxes is likely to go out of business as soon as the company not paying taxes realizes it will be the sole survivor in a price war. So unless all corporations are good citizens, the ones that are will be destroyed in the market by the ones that aren't.

Which means that the solution has to be to force them to all be good citizens, i.e. to adopt taxes they can't avoid, not to appeal to the corporations to voluntarily commit suicide by doing the right thing unilaterally when no one else is doing it.