America is a nation proud to embrace capitalism, but the capitalism of today's America, is a bastardization of capitalism. In true capitalism, there is freedom of choice, freedom to decide where to invest one's time and money, freedom to produce what one desires to produce, and the marketplace decides whether to buy and what they are willing to pay for the goods that they desire or need. The government 's role in this pure form of capitalism is strictly to determine that the overall exchange and production process does not damage or harm public space such as our natural resources and spaces owned collectively by the people and that the playing field is not corrupt or unfair to the general public.
The thing about taxation as represented by what occurs in America today, is the very fact that goods and income are taxed on so many different levels, so too that there are endless rules and regulations, along with licenses, various bureaucracies on the Federal, State, and local levels, politicians and their lobbyists, of which all of this combined, serves to upset the normal order of things. This means, that business as run currently and monitored by governmental and tax authorities is widely divergent in the effect and fairness of the overall treatment of individuals, corporations, partnerships, and so forth, so that those that are on the inside have massive advantages over those that are on the outside.
Further to the point, while America once prided itself upon failing or succeeding on one's own merits, this has morphed into a game, in which those at the very top, or at least those with the money and connections to play at the very top, are able to bend, mend, and change the rules so that the risk of their businesses are managed in such a manner that when times are good and profits are thereby generated, that those profits remain in privatized hands of corporate interests for the most part, with an absolute minimum amount of taxation being returned to the government, which, in theory, represents the people. On the other hand, should these businesses make bad choices, overextend themselves, run their business with reckless risk, if they are large enough, or are connected enough, these losses aren't stuck on the business, itself, but instead are foisted upon the government which absorbs this loss, and leaves the people, the taxpayer and thereby future generations suffering for mistakes not of their own.
Any country, that can say with a straight face, that particular institutions are "too big to fail" and thereby props them up or doesn't initiate wholesale changes so as to make them smaller and more manageable, is a country that has betrayed its people. The business of business in America today, is business in which the government works with the favored few, so as to manipulate rules and regulations to specifically benefit certain businesses at the expense of other businesses and the people; creating tax laws that are so convoluted and corrupt that there is no fairness, and allowing again and again, those that have no skin in the game, to wrongly reap the cream of crop, while sticking the taxpayers with the inevitable losses from overleveraged bets gone horribly awry.
If America will not hold accountable the debts and mistakes that large corporations make by saving such corporations from their failures and thereby socializing those debts and losses to the overburdened public, while at the same time allowing these same corporations and especially their principle players to reap the benefit of their large ill-gotten gains, than the American people will become, in effect, perpetual serfs to their feudal lords.