Dear Statists, Collectivists, Wimps and Socialists...

[megadog]

Tax-avoidance is arranging one's affairs within the scope of the tax-code to minimise one's liability to pay tax. It's perfectly legal and - unless you in some warped way believe that the State knows better how to spend your money than you do - perfectly moral.

It's tax-evasion which is the illegal thing. To quote:

“No man in the country is under

Comments

[aerowolf]

There exists one main reason to not engage in maximum avoidance of taxes: the state is that which provides order and enforcement of that order. It is the state which provides the legal and regulatory framework for ensuring that the amenities of modern life are available (including this global communications network upon which we communicate even now).

Imagine a world where the copper or fiber could be unilaterally seized by people who didn't want to leave it in place for those who actually provide services for others -- imagine a world where there was no protection of various bands of the wireless spectrum. Imagine a world where your line-of-sight could be broken indiscriminately, even preventing laser or microwave communication.

Imagine a world without currency, where barter is the sole option. Imagine a world where there is nowhere near enough electricity generated or distributed to be able to calculate or manage the blockchain of BitCoin. Much less nowhere near enough connectivity to be able to communicate said blockchain.

That is the world without taxes.

I dislike that the state (every state!) has chosen to impose an additional "you must focus some amount of time, or hire someone else to do so, to minimize your tax burden" time tax. I dislike that the burden of tax falls unfairly on those who are too busy trying to make ends meet to be able to focus on the tax code for the minimum time necessary to obtain the benefit. But I cannot in the least claim that the taxes that must be paid are unfair or inappropriate to be paid. I'd like to get away from lesser taxation as a means of incentive. I'd like to form a mechanism where society for itself can identify what effort would be best spent, and find people who are willing to do it -- and let anyone else who isn't willing to do it be left alone as they wish.

But until then, until you have a plan to address every social ill that the state actually addresses with the tax money that you pay, I think it's fair to say that the state really does have a better idea of how to spend the money that it legitimately should be able to claim from every beneficiary of its order than each individual citizen.

Taxes, after all, are just "commissions" for providing order in commerce (sales taxes), and "royalties" for providing order in accumulation (income and land taxes). In most circumstances, accumulation could not happen at all without benefit of the order provided by the state. Thus, as much as it rather annoys me to have to put it this way: if you want to minimize your taxes, you should also minimize the services that you benefit from. But you benefit from the treatment of the mentally ill and the provision of the social safety nets (reducing panhandling and extreme poverty, thus permitting more workers to exist to provide the services that you consume) even if you didn't agree to it -- and thus, you can rightfully be viewed as someone who benefits and must thus pay your share for it.

And that doesn't even begin to address the cost of maintaining trained military against invasion -- would you personally be able to protect your land from an entire platoon of [insert most hated foreign nationality here] who were bearing down with guns and grenades? Or planes dropping bombs? (I dislike the use of troops being deployed elsewhere, but again, I can't claim that I know best.)

If you did not pay taxes for these things, you would be left defenseless against internal social strife (and probably assaults) and external military threats (which are almost by definition assaults).

Everyone sane should be realistically examining the true costs of what services they consume, and should realistically examine what imbalances make it unlikely that others will be able to pay their equal share, to determine what they could realistically pay to ensure that the services are paid for. That's what the politicians are already supposed to do in crafting the Tax Code. And every citizen pays them to remove that concern from their daily lives.