You’re arguing against a straw man. OP wasn’t saying the self employed incorporate in Estonia. They said they are efficient with taxes. They even gave a specific example: business expenses.
For example, I run a business in Canada, and know that food and drinks are only 50% deductible. Therefore, at a 50% marginal tax rate those items effectively cost business 50% more than, say, buying office supplies. And that informs decision making.
It’s also vital to know how different capital cost classes and depreciation schedules affect things, or to properly set up a home office deduction , and to deduct everything deductible.
Most of these things are set it and forget it. It’s absolutely worth doing correctly even at a self employed scale.
Legitimately expensing office supplies is scarcely considered "corporate tax avoidance" and not reasonable to call "stealing".
Since the OP was making this direct comparison, and you seem to like fallacies, you can take it that I am calling their argument a slippery slope fallacy.
I am the OP and I was not making this direct comparison.
I was pointing out that it's common for the small business to perform tax efficiency, which is extremely widespread and taught in small business courses. Most people running a small business or self-employed relate to it, and it's indeed a "set and forget" thing, mainly because you just do what the accountant tells you.
In that world, tax efficiency is largely seen as the right thing to do and sensible ("good").
And when you scale that up, the end result looks like international corporate tax avoidance ("bad").
That's not at all the same as saying the small business version is tax avoidance of the "bad" kind.
It's saying that one thing follows from another, not that they are the same thing.
And so we can't solve international corporate tax avoidance by a simple expedient of trying to "ban" or "shame" it, because there isn't any clear boundary at which sensible, approved, "good" tax efficiency turns into shameworthy "bad" avoidance.
And so, to solve it, we need to use a different method, and I advocated such a method.
Following the common tax rules to run a competitive and productive business does not inevitably lead to calculating and exploiting (and lobbying to create) loopholes in international tax law.
For example, I run a business in Canada, and know that food and drinks are only 50% deductible. Therefore, at a 50% marginal tax rate those items effectively cost business 50% more than, say, buying office supplies. And that informs decision making.
It’s also vital to know how different capital cost classes and depreciation schedules affect things, or to properly set up a home office deduction , and to deduct everything deductible.
Most of these things are set it and forget it. It’s absolutely worth doing correctly even at a self employed scale.