If the government wants a tax to be paid they need to make it simple and unconditional. If there are loopholes or ways to legally avoid it, they will be discovered and people will take advantage of them.
you could make an argument that in order to optimise your taxes, you have to be quite wealthy to begin with (hiring a tax guy, etc.) - otherwise you don't have any time left in the day to run your business.
so in practice, the little guy winds up just paying the 'sticker price' so to speak, while the big guy has pros who can make their big profits even bigger.
If you're "a little guy" - as I would consider myself - there are usually zero open doors and zero opportunities in this world, except for starting your own company. And it is possible to optimize your taxes from the start when your business is small. Most governments and states in the world actively encourage this by giving tax relief to small businesses, and then other types of incentives. The price for "hiring a tax guy" depends very much on the scale of your business, in the beginning it's not a lot of money, if you even need him.
For all this talk about "equality", this is the only thing that actually functions in our modern world.
The article is mostly about avoiding taxes on "having your startup acquired" - not everyone will be able to do that.
But setting up funds and deduce everything you buy ? Creating shill companies ? Becoming a trustee for some random that badly wants to avoid their taxes ? Sounds like that can be automated ?
Sure, it would be insanely immoral, and I hope the person who master tax avoidance get to loose access to everything payed by the tax payers, just doe thrill.
Or maybe we should have voluntary taxation ; but, beyond a certain level, you really loose access. Don't want to pay ? Sure. You put off the fires yourself, you heal and tech your kids yourself, you build and drive on your own roads, fund your own research, don't access supermarkets that are full of FDA-vetted food, etc...
In all seriousness, if budgets were voted by "real" people and not representatives, how many of things would survive ? Can you convince people about the usefulness of tax free 10M$ startup sale, where every cent your earn is taxed as some portion ?
Anyway, let the tax avoidance experts be the richest of their graveyards.
Another way of thinking about this is that the wealthy person is incentivized to invest their wealth directly into higher-risk, economy-boosting activities like starting businesses that (if successful) create jobs that then pay income taxes. Ideally tax revenue is generated from this incentive. The wealthy person could just buy gold bars and create no jobs that generate income tax, but they don't get as good a tax deal on that.
At least in the USA, I don't think there is any need to "incentivize" going into business via the tax code. Most people who can afford to own a business already do, and many people who really can't afford it still try! "I'd love to start a business and try to make a bunch of money, but those darn taxes are stopping me!" - said no US entrepreneur ever. They're not doing it for these small tax incentives, but they are certainly taking advantage of them whenever they can.
So it seems like we are simply incentivizing activity that's already going to happen and allowing people who were already going to do it anyway to have that activity be not subject to taxes.