Of Stolen Lives and Valor

With delight I was reading about the United States Supreme Court and the Stolen Valor Statute, which criminalizes lies about having received war medals. You may wonder about the harm caused by such lying. If you do you are not alone, because Justice Alito (usually űber-conservative) also did during the recent oral argument(February 22, 2012):

 JUSTICE ALITO: Suppose what the person gets [in exchange] is — is a date with a potential rich spouse. Would that be enough [harm caused]?
MR. LIBBY[lawyer]: Your Honor, I think when it comes — when you get into the situation where you’re getting something like a date, I do not know that — I certainly wouldn’t consider that a non de minimis thing of value, but -­
JUSTICE ALITO: Some people might have a different opinion. (Laughter.)

I know that there may be many statutes which try to make us righteous, but few are enforced. In fact, when it comes to corporations it seems that the more they deceive the Treasury about their profits or employment practices, the more we try to accommodate such behavior. Strange, isn’t it? Or maybe not. You tell me, is it worse to lie about having received a medal, or to destroy people’s lives by denying them making a living?

Now, you may want to correct me and remind me that the Obama Administration is not complacent about this state of affairs. In fact, this Administration wants to address such illegal corporate behavior and lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28 %. Don’t panic as if it does not make any sense. In exchange, the Administration hopes that U.S. corporations would be grateful and spend some of their hidden profits on U.S. personnel and perhaps pay U.S. taxes rather than dodge them.

What do you think? Is it going to work?

Take the following example. If you were a Mafia boss and had received an offer to become half of a Mafia boss, would you take that suicidal offer?  So, going back to our corporate game, do you think that a corporation which has made billions in profits by using foreign sweatshops, and declaring less profits would give up that for a mere 7% tax deduction? I doubt it. On the bright side they might keep employing U.S. lawyers, whose superb education taught them how to find new loopholes and push for further corporate tax breaks. Of course, Indian lawyers tend to be equally prepared for such legal tasks. So, perhaps this Administration is correct in its desire to do nothing to challenge corporate greed.

While for the rest of us, we should be happy that there are still people who lie about medals and let us apprehend them. It keeps us busy.