<i>"It's not just administrative overhead, it's friction in getting things done. There is such a thing as objective value creation."</i><p>Yeah, which is why I said you could make that argument, and why I mentioned my second point -- small businesses just don't spend that much on this kind of thing.  It's a red herring.<p><i>"I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your argument that moving jobs from tax accounting/legal which attempt to manage friction in transactions to professions that create goods and services people actually want to pay for is just 'shuffling the jobs around'."</i><p>You shouldn't laugh <i>or</i> cry, because it's just a statement of fact.  I said that people who have jobs as accountants and lawyers are, by definition, <i>people with jobs</i>.  So if you eliminate one accountant's job, and replace it with some other kind of job, you <i>haven't increased the number of jobs</i>.  At best, you've made some small move toward "increasing productivity", which will then perhaps have a non-linear increase in other jobs, but that's an extremely tenuous argument for most small businesses.<p><i>"As an extension of your argument, shouldn't the government employ everyone by fiat and simply abolish unemployment?"</i><p>No.  That would be stupid.  It has nothing to do with my argument.<p><i>" This is especially made particularly absurd that the US Treasury Secretary couldn't even figure out how to pay his own taxes but now runs the IRS. There is something very very wrong with this picture."</i><p>Straw Man.  I'm not arguing that the complexity of the tax code is a good thing; I'm arguing that reducing the complexity of the tax code is very different than "lowering the corporate tax rate".  I'm also arguing that rich people like Mark Cuban have a disproportionate interest in doing the latter, in the guise of doing the former.