Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Australia's second-largest pension fund blacklists thermal coal investments | Reuters I was thinking of using this story for my round-up of financial news later this year. Now, I don't think I will.  As regular readers surely know, in an end-of-year post I go month-by-month through the year just ended listing the big Fin news stories. My choices are not always about the story itself, but about the theme it illustrates.    In May 2024, though? I'll go with something else.  Still, this story illustrates a major point in the financial history of our time. Pension fund managers are powerful people.  Not just because they are rich (they usually aren't), and not because they can order armies into motion (they can't), but because they write or refuse to write very big checks. If a pension fund the size of the Australian Retirement Trust won't invest any further in thermal coal investments on a continent where thermal coal has long been a big part of the energy picture:...

She (my friend) then added her own comment: There were a lot of things wrong with the 50's, but one parent working with another one staying home (which they owned) was doable when the onus of taxes wasn't on citizens. The onus of taxes wasn't on the citizens because it was on the "corporations" you see. She seemed to be agreeing with the Sanders quote she attached that we ought to get back to that. But what does it mean to tax corporations exactly? Is it a free lunch for the "citizens"? Of course not. Depending on a variety of circumstances, a corporate tax gets money into the Treasury from one of three sources: the shareholders of the corporation in question; the consumers of the products and services it creates; the employees. If the labor market for the sort of labor a particular corporation needs will allow, the corporation (a legal form for the interactions of natural people) will pass the cost of the tax that way. If the labor market does...