Thought of the Day

"Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away."

-Daniel Bliss

A Call To Arms For Tax Accountants

Accountancy  always suffers the reputation for being boring and dreary. "We pore through arcane pages of tax law to find out how to slightly alter the deductions on some or other special purpose entity! What could be more thrilling?"

Okay, so the day-to-day business of accounting might not be fun. But the purpose of it can be made much more exciting - I help free citizens cheat the government out of ill-deserved tax revenues! Pro-tax-avoidance types are often fond of quoting Judge Learned Hand on this point:

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."

This is good, as far as it goes. It has some resemblance, although imprecise, to the standard defence of capitalism - sure, this whole greed thing is bad, but capitalism channels it towards socially beneficial purposes. Here, the equivalent is that everyone tries to pay less tax, and so you don't need to feel bad about that.

In other words, your desire to keep your own money is widespread, so obey the law, but otherwise feel free to keep your own cash. Sound advice, but not exactly uplifting. You wouldn't want to be trying to inspire people to man the barricades with that. The big missing piece is an explanation for why exactly 'all do right' by avoiding taxes. Judge Hand never really tells us why that is.

What you really want, rather, is the tax avoidance equivalent of the Ayn Rand argument for capitalism, which phrased it as a morally correct system, rather than as a morally fraught but practically effective system. Rand's argument, which is relevant here too, is essentially that all interactions between men either happen by voluntary contract, as epitomised by money, or at the point of a gun. Thus capitalism is in fact a morally uplifting system, rewarding men's ingenuity for satisfying the desires of other men, and providing value in exchange for value.

And to get the tax-avoidance version of that, you need the great Lysander Spooner:

All political power, so called, rests practically upon this matter of money. Any number of scoundrels, having money enough to start with, can establish themselves as a "government"; because, with money, they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money; and also compel general obedience to their will. It is with government, as Caesar said it was in war, that money and soldiers mutually supported each other; that with money he could hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. So these villains, who call themselves governments, well understand that their power rests primarily upon money. With money they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. And, when their authority is denied, the first use they always make of money, is to hire soldiers to kill or subdue all who refuse them more money.

For this reason, whoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts, viz.: 1. That every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against him, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will. 2. That those who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place, will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he presumes to resist their demands in the future. 3. That it is a perfect absurdity to suppose that any body of men would ever take a man's money without his consent, for any such object as they profess to take it for, viz., that of protecting him; for why should they wish to protect him, if he does not wish them to do so? To suppose that they would do so, is just as absurd as it would be to suppose that they would take his money without his consent, for the purpose of buying food or clothing for him, when he did not want it. 4. If a man wants "protection," he is competent to make his own bargains for it; and nobody has any occasion to rob him, in order to "protect" him against his will. 5. That the only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in their keeping their money in their own pockets, until they have assurances, perfectly satisfactory to themselves, that it will be used as they wish it to be used, for their benefit, and not for their injury. 6. That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.

Quite so.

Tomorrow, I'm off to my accountant to find out how to squeeze every possible deduction| out of my tax returns. Do your patriotic duty and take back every cent you can from the megatherion in Washington!

Gazing into the Abyss

"During the killings I no longer considered anything in particular in the Tutsi except that the person had to be done away with. I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one"

-Leopord Twagirayezu, in Machete Season

Thought of the Day

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f***ing khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

-Fight Club

Or if you prefer the book:

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

-Chuck Palahniuk

Point, Counterpoint

Point:



Counterpoint:

"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind: It would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this government falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination we will have."

- Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy - 1864

Thought of the Day

The great David Foster Wallace, describing the mindset of the suicidal:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”  

Thought of the Day

The contemporary mind, as illustrated by Ms. Roiphe's, has fundamental problems grasping useful concepts like "on average" and "tends to."

-Steve Sailer, opining on an article where the aforementioned Ms. Roiphe got into a huge tizzy over a New York Times piece reporting on the totally obvious fact that children of single parents tend to have fewer opportunities than those born to married parents.

The phenomenon goes much further than this, of course. As Mr Sailer well knows.

Quote of the Day

I came across this old interview with Theodore Dalrymple, when he's talking about his [thoroughly excellent] book 'Life At The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass'

He describes perfectly the attitude of so many urban youths:

"It doesn't take long or cost much to have a small tattoo done," Dalrymple writes. "You can stigmatize yourself thoroughly in an hour or more for a mere fifty dollars. . . . Watching as yet untattooed young men browsing through the patterns in the parlor reception areas, I felt like a Victorian evangelist or campaigner against prostitution, an impulse rising within me to exhort them to abjure evil; but their adoption of the characteristic expression of the urban underclass (a combination of bovine vacancy and lupine malignity) soon put [an end] to my humanitarian impulse."

'Bovine vacancy and lupine malignity'. Is that not the best metaphor you've read in months?

At first I thought this was said in the interview itself, but on re-reading I think it's from the book. If he came up with that extemporaneously, it would put him up there with the wittiest men of this century (even if the humour is somewhat grim). As it is, it's still brilliant.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

Via Hacker News comes this great observation:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.

The logic being that this tends to be attached to controversial claims, and if the author had enough facts to determine conclusively that the the claim were true, they would assert the matter directly.

Thought of the Day

"No man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune."

Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy

Wodehouse on Golf

P.G. Wodehouse with a great description (in the wonderful old British style) of the golfing overconfidence of the mediocre:

It seemed to him that his troubles were over. Like all twenty-four handicap man, he had the most perfect confidence in his ability to beat all other twenty-four handicap men.

Ha!

You could also say basically the same thing about tennis, ten-pin bowling, pool, and a number of other things. When you see someone equally rubbish as yourself, it's hard to not be disgusted at their lack of skill. This leads you to think that it must be easy to beat them, forgetting that you yourself are equally dismal.

Although there are, of course, endless subspecies in their ranks, not all of which have yet been classified by science, twenty-four handicap golfers may be stated broadly to fall into two classes, the dashing and the cautious - those, that is to say, who endeavor to do every hole in a brilliant one and those who are content to win with a steady nine.

Yep. The same is definitely also true for tennis. I think it also contributes to the earlier effect. The dashing think that their power will let them streak to the lead over the cautious. The cautious, meanwhile, are sure that the dashing will screw up and the cautious will overtake them like the tortoise.

Understatement of the Day

From Mencius Moldbug's 'Letter to Open-Minded Progressives'

Thus we see why progressivism is more fashionable than conservatism. Progressive celebrities, for example, are everywhere. Conservative ones are exceptions. This is cold calculation: Bono's PR people are happy that he's speaking out against AIDS. Mel Gibson's PR people are not happy that he's speaking out against the Jews.

Ha!

Thought of the Day

"The hour for your departure draws near; if you will but forget all else and pay sole regard to the helmsman of your soul and the divine spark within you - if you will but exchange your fear of having to end your life some day for a fear of failing even to begin it on nature's true principles - you can yet become a man, worthy of the universe that gave you birth, instead of a stranger in your own homeland, bewildered by each day's happenings as though by wonders unlooked for, and ever hanging upon this one or the next."

-Marcus Aurelius, 'Meditations'