As Amazon continues to whip up populist rage in its voter referendum effort in California (see the earlier Moby report),  a particularly astute column in Slate by Farhad Manjoo on the Amazon vs. California tax fight has been making the rounds of publishing offices the last day or two.

One reason it’s being so heavily circulated is that it in response to Amazon’s massive disinformation campaign, Manjoo does a nice job of clarifying the truth behind several of the key issues. For example:

… the idea that Amazon is an “out-of-state” retailer in California is a complete fiction. Amazon owns several subsidiaries whose primary offices are located in the state. Within a 30-minute drive from my home, I can visit some of Amazon’s most important divisions—A9, which builds its product search engine, is located in Palo Alto, while Lab 126, the Amazon office that designs the Kindle, is in Cupertino. Amazon has also repeatedly claimed that the California law is unconstitutional, but it has not (yet) filed suit against the measure. I suspect it’s afraid it might lose on the merits—that any judge who hears that Amazon builds its most successful product in the state will declare the company to be as Californian as Apple Inc.

It doesn’t make Manjoo any less persuasive in that he also seems like a pretty reasonable guy, giving Amazon their due when it’s appropriate:

Amazon has long argued that it is not really opposed to collecting state sales taxes—what it really hates is the headache of adhering to different rules in different states. “Our point of view on this is that we should simplify the sales tax system, and we’ve been consistent on this for about 10 years,” CEO Jeff Bezos told Consumer Reports in May. Specifically, Amazon favors something called the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement. The agreement creates a single list of what kinds of goods and services are taxable, and makes rates across states more uniform. Collecting state sales taxes in the absence of such an agreement, Amazon says, is terribly complicated—the company will have to constantly keep track of what’s taxable where, and at what rate.

I’ll agree with Amazon—the SSTA is a pretty good tax-reform idea. The trouble is, at the moment it’s mostly just an idea—and a pie-in-the-sky one, too. So far, 44 states have signed the pledge, but only 24 have passed legislation to enact it. In order for the states to be able to force online retailers to collect taxes under the agreement, the federal government will also need to pass legislation recognizing the agreement. Over the last few sessions of Congress, lawmakers in both parties have introduced bills to do so. But none of those efforts has gone anywhere, and the latest bill—championed by Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin—is unlikely to do any better. Other than as a convenient way for Bezos to deflect questions about Amazon’s position on taxes, the company hasn’t lent much support to a streamlined tax initiative, either—certainly not anything like the resources it’s now spending to fight states’ tax plans.

What’s more, it’s hard to believe that Amazon doesn’t have the resources to keep track of different states’ tax rules. Every other retailer has to keep track of such data; that’s the cost of having a business that spans many states. Amazon is a pioneering tech company—it knows every purchase I’ve made since 1998, and it is capable of predicting with uncanny accuracy what kinds of stuff I want to purchase today. Does it really expect us to believe that it couldn’t manage a database of taxable goods?

But the real thing about Manjoo’s column that’s earning it a lot of industry buzz is the way he drains the emotionality out of the story and gets to the point:

Millions of Californians, myself included, love shopping at Amazon because it’s cheap and convenient. Now the state wants to make it slightly less cheap. Even though I agree with the fairness argument intellectually, I feel an instant aversion to my prices going up. The Amazon loophole—the ability to buy that TV for not a dollar more than its sales price—motivates many of my purchases, and I’d really hate for it to go away.

In other words, this isn’t an argument between two equally reasonable positions. It’s an argument between reason and emotion, between your brain and your gut. Amazon has no intellectually sound arguments against collecting taxes from residents—by all ethical and civic standards, its position is unsound. Instead, Amazon is counting on our emotions prevailing—on loyal, tax-savvy customers like me lashing out at our price-hiking legislators. I worry that there’s a good chance Amazon—and people like me—will prevail.

… The reasons for Amazon’s tax battle are obvious. It’s not that it can’t institute a sensible tax collection regime, but that it won’t, because it has no incentive to do so. Amazon’s position may be indefensible, but it has a trump card. Raise your hand if you want higher prices. Yeah, that’s what I thought.