Role of Corporations

Do corporations have a role when it comes to citizenship?  Should corporations have a fiscal responsibility towards paying the costs of government?  To hear some on the right, corporations should pay even lower taxes than at present even though corporate tax receipts as a percentage of government revenue are at all time lows.  Many of those arguments are based upon assertions that the corporate tax rates in the United States are among the highest in the world.  These arguments however, fail take into consideration that the United States expends far more in protecting the interests of both corporations and corporate personnel than every other country in the world.  There are many who feel that the entire logic behind the war in Iraq was based upon the protection of oil interests of mostly American owned corporations.  It goes without saying that American corporations such as Halliburton and the corporate subsidiaries of this company profited from the Iraq war.  It also goes without saying that many corporations that actually did profit from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were able to avoid paying U.S, federal income taxes on those profits by moving their corporate headquarters offshore and parking their profits off shore.  The real question is whether or not corporations have an obligation to be good citizens.  Should U.S. corporations consider what might be best for the country when making corporate decisions?  At what point, if any, should the needs of the country trump the desire for greater corporate profits?  Without the laws that enable a business to incorporate, there would be no corporations.  Without the tax laws that give thousands of benefits to corporations and permit corporations to pay lower taxes than the legal tax rate, corporate taxes receipts would be far greater.  If the U.S. government did not aid in the creation of various stock and commodity exchanges U.S. corporations would not be so able to trade stock in their companies and individual stock owners would not be able to derive significant income from the purchase and sale of corporate stock.  And, in the case of many corporations, the sales of the products of those companies would be severely curtailed without the various commodity exchanges.  All of these benefits have costs that are born by some phase of government.  Who should be responsible for paying these costs if not the corporations themselves. Finally, do corporations have any responsibility to the city and state where they locate? Should corporations be enabled so as to be able to play one local against another inorder to get the most incentives to relocate?  Should corporations be permitted to relocate out of the country in order to get lower labor costs?  If so, should the government give corporations tax benefits or tax incentives to help offset the relocation costs?  At what point, if any, should “we, the people” require corporations to act as good citizens just as we expect individuals to do so?