The Public Accounts Committee has criticised HM Revenue & Customs for its “unacceptably slow” action against tax avoiders.
Here we go again. Tax avoidance is legal, therefore there should be no need for the HMRC to take action. Tax evasion on the other hand is illegal, so the HMRC should take action. Tax avoidance is merely managing one’s financial affairs in order to minimise one’s exposure to the thieving hand of the state. It is not only legal, it is a moral duty and I damned well intend to carry on being as aggressive in my avoidance as I possibly can. Every penny I keep out of the grasping, greedy hands of these charlatans is a penny not wasted on insane, illiberal surveillance and social control schemes (yes, nudge, I’m looking at you), quangos, fake charities, foreign aid and unnecessary government departments.
Margaret Hodge, chair of the committee, said the inaction was putting tax revenues at risk: “HMRC must do more, faster.”
Hypocrisy; thy name is Margaret Hodge…
I am avoiding tax using the most widespread scheme. I am working very little (and none of it in Britain) to avoid earning money that would mostly be taken from me by the state. I am running down my capital to avoid leaving 40% of it to the state. I choose to live on 1/8th of what I used to earn when working abroad because the tax take here is unacceptably high so I would mostly be working for my enemies and I no longer need to do that. I no longer provide as much Keynesian stimulus and I no longer create wealth or – incidentally – jobs. Given the employment laws here, I want an employee about as much as I want a less metaphorical headache. Even so the parasitocracy still takes money from me in Council Tax, fuel tax and VAT etc as well as income tax on the modest amounts I choose to earn to keep my mind active or help old friends. The only action HMRC could take against this tax avoidance scheme would be to upgrade the time share slavery they usually impose to the full on chained and whipped variety. Since they are by definition too stupid to understand any work I might choose to do and any work they might force on me would probably earn less than my minimal current efforts, they would make amusingly incompetent slave drivers. And yet the state’s minions never stop criticising the businesses that create the wealth they live on because – clearly – they know so much better how to run them. In fairness I suppose that in a sense their “business” produces an infinite return on capital as any attempt to calculate it produces a divide by zero error. So they probably don’t grasp the more modest returns on honest toil.
My approach is similar in that I keep my profits low – well below the 40% threshold. I still have to earn a living, so accept that there will be a hit, but spend as much as I can on the business to avoid paying tax on it.
We are not alone in this. A relative of mine closed his business laying off 40 staff because he and his partner of decades decided that the risks were theirs but the profits mostly the state’s. And lots of my older friends of proper retirement age would be wealth-generating yet if they could leave it to their children not to the parasitocracy. It’s nuts to punish economic production and reward idleness but what else can we expect from a political class as divorced from reality as ours? Their idleness, after all, is very profitable indeed – to them.