Because corporations will simply pass the cost to the consumer of their products as much as possible.

That's what reducing externalities looks like. The consumer is supposed to pay the cost of the products they buy unless it's a common good that benefits more than the consumer.

I get my hair cut at Roosters. It's a concept created by SuperCuts that gives me beer. I pay like $40 for a half-hour haircut. While at Roosters I get my hair cut by a nice Thai lady who cut hair at Supercuts for fifteen years. Roosters? She does two haircuts an hour. Supercuts? She did six. And yeah - I could get my hair cut at Supercuts for $15. But I like the way a half-hour haircut looks better.

So I pay for it.

Workers and creators are going to have to care a lot more about making money if the cost of every consumer good increases.

That's the very definition of a "free market." Supply goes down, demand goes up. Cost goes up, price goes up. "Tax the wealthy?" That's not economics. That's policy. You're not setting supply and demand now you're setting social structure. The argument is not "the rich don't deserve to be as rich as they are" it's "the rich didn't get rich without the help of everyone else and we should recognize that help by spreading their gains around to those that helped." The economic theories behind individual taxation are a lot more theoretical than demand curves.

To me, corporations are close to a definition of wealth that is not idle.

Curious as to your thoughts about share buybacks, then.

Taxes are for things we want less of. They are a disincentive.

Sorry, dude, that's nonsense. Taxes are the cost of operation. Even "sin tax" is couched in the form of "something to pay for the societal harm caused by this vice" such as cigarettes, gasoline, liquor, gambling, whatever.

I do not believe we want less businesses.

I've participated in a number of small businesses and have many friends with small businesses. The only time I've ever seen anybody squeak about taxes is my buddy who used his own insurance as a pass-through to run a couple half-million dollar jobs instead of using his S-corp. City of Los Angeles taxes on income not revenue so he, personally, had to eat a $15k tax bill.

Had he done it legit through his s-corp he would have been taxed zero.