Part of why individuals like Benioff could crow about giving back was because of how comprehensively they had taken to begin with. They had benefited from public goods financed by taxpayers—the schools that educated their employees; the internet, developed by publicly funded research; the roads, the bridges, and the rest of modern infrastructure, which enabled commerce—and then deployed their lobbyists, accountants, and lawyers to master legal forms of tax evasion that starved the system. They had transferred wealth from the public to themselves by rewriting the tax code in their favor,
...more
