Patriotic Millionaires Chair Morris Pearl doesn’t want his taxes cut as part of a reform of our tax code.

Well, those of us who are less wealthy spend their money, they don’t invest it in assets. Investing in assets is not what grows the economy. Spending money is what grows the economy.

This is where he parts company with his sensei, though: he appears not to understand how a free market, capitalist economy works.

From where does Pearl think the things on which people spend money come—the turnip tree? From where does Pearl think folks get the money to spend—the dollar tree?

It takes folks working—jobs—to produce the goods and services on which we spend our money. It takes folks working—jobs—to earn the money to spend.  It takes both spending and asset investment—jobs creation—to grow an economy.  And that takes money left in the private economy—lower tax rates for all, including the rich.

Pearl also admits he’d only pay the taxes required; he wouldn’t make donations to the Treasury of amounts equal to the reduction in his taxes.  He just demands to impose his views on all of us.  In that, he follows his sensei assiduously.

In a 130-page decision from August that was made public on Monday, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, asserted that two Apple units registered in Ireland brought in $130 billion in profit over an 11-year period that should have been taxed at Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate, but instead remained largely untaxed anywhere.

As the WSJ noted, this is an early volley in the struggle by European Union authorities to impose their tax will on scofflaw sovereign nations who are so impertinent as to apply to multinational corporations doing business within them national tax schemes and such emoluments as these nations deem useful rather than acceding to their EU Know Betters.

Never mind that the members of the EU still are sovereign nations.

Never mind that, in the present case, Ireland simply applied its domestic law to that subset of an international corporation doing business from within Ireland.

Never mind that Ireland has an unacceptably low (to the EU Know Betters) corporate tax rate, and so it’s winning the competition with continental Europe to attract business.

Maybe Ireland should reevaluate its relationship with the European Union.