> When it comes to the question of how much of the money that I earn must be surrendered to prevent me from going to jail, the state is my adversary.

That's your choice. You could also see it as paying your dues, or even as doing your part in maintaining your society. The optimal attitude is probably somewhere between those views.

> Taxes are routinely used to punish and influence people. Alcohol taxes, tobacco taxes, fuel taxes, they all have the dual purpose of raising revenue and discouraging behavior that the state wishes to limit.

Well, that's the point of having a state. It's often a good thing, especially in the examples you mentioned. One of the most important function of a state is to serve as a coordination enforcer - in situations when people, out of their self-interest, would predictably chose something that aggregated over the entire population leads to bad outcomes for everyone, the state is there to alter the incentive landscape and make sure they chose the better thing.

>When it comes to the question of how much of the money that I earn must be surrendered to prevent me from going to jail, the state is my adversary.

The fact that you earn anything at all, or that you don't get robbed, or that you have any property rights at all, is a function of the state. I'm sure you consider the state your ally for those reasons.

The state would publish a simple tax table, if people just followed it without going into legal word games and battles over verbiage and what the word "income" means.

>they all have the dual purpose of raising revenue and discouraging behavior that the state wishes to limit.

The state limits the behavior that they have been elected to limit. Occasionally, such limits get repealed when the citizenry chooses that they no longer wish to have that behavior be controlled.

The companies are mostly responsible for creating them, though. No representative is out there introducing complex tax loopholes that benefit his donors without prompting. Whether or not it is immoral to use those loopholes once they exist, the process of lobbying to create specific loopholes so you don't have to pay anymore seems more clearly unethical to me. You're basically "investing" lobbying money in exchange for a huge RoI in the form of tax breaks.

The difference is in the intent which can be hard to prove.

Corporations all over the world have local politicians in their pockets. Who "signs" the laws is a technicality.

In the US you even see the President after his term be openly welcomed to the Board of some large corporation or another that his regime benefited...

You just answered your own question. For more, do a web search for ALEC.

Let's try on an example: All revenue is taxed at 20%. Now this will work for some businesses, as the cost to make the product is low enough, and the sale price high enough, that 20% can be paid and there is still profit left over. But then there are very low margin, high volume businesses. They may have only a marginal profit per unit sold due to the nature of what they are selling, leaving no room for 20% tax.

So we add in an exception that says "You can deduct from revenue the cost of goods sold" (i.e., tax on net instead of gross). Now all the business has to do is find ways of hiding profit in the cost of goods sold.

Then there are products which contain materials that changed hands many times before it got to the final product. So if a raw material (lets say, cotton) is the majority expense, it has to go to one company to refine it, a second company to turn it into thread, a third to add color, a fourth to make it into fabric, and finally a fifth company to make a shirt. So that cotton gets taxed 5 times before it gets sold to the end consumer.

So let's add another exception, that goods sold for use in making another product aren't taxed -- that way, large businesses that produce the entire vertical stack in-house don't have an unfair tax advantage against smaller companies. Gee, now we have another loophole that can be creatively exploited.