Your response to @Michael.Lederman is correct, but someone who demonstrated a lack of rudimentary economic skills in the same post where he mocks others for not having them is not going to grasp what you’re saying. Putting economic knowledge aside, John Galt there clearly doesn’t understand the role that tax breaks (local? federal? makes no difference to him) do or don’t play in the (very different) business cases he cites.
The only shareholders who usually have that kind of clout with a large corporation are the institutional investors. The corporations usually neuter them by offering the institution or a close affiliate a board seat of its own.
It’s clearly understood that the article is discussing corporate tax breaks in the current atmosphere of late-stage capitalism resulting from 30+ years of deregulation, supply-side economics and the neoliberal consensus. In that context, the current tax break situation is indeed absurd. It now favours corporate executives and shareholders (in that order) to a highly unbalanced degree compared to the benefits accruing to the local or domestic economy that’s offering the break.
Tax breaks, like debt, are best used as a situational tool and not as a way of life. The article describes an economy in which the latter assumption has been in effect for at least two decades, to a point where even the U.S.'s relatively low corporate taxes still aren’t good enough for some corporations.
