The brains that go into tax avoidance, which are generally recognized as including some of the best legal brains extant, constitute a wasted national resource, it is widely contended—and this contention is cheerfully upheld by some leading tax lawyers, who seem only too glad to affirm, first, that their mental capacities are indeed exceptional, and, second, that these capacities are indeed being squandered on trivia.
I think this is the saddest part. Just a little worse than intellectual waste on hedge funds, just worse than ‘financial engineering’ a la synthetic CDOs, CDSs etc.
