Legal and Moral are two, at best, loosely coupled concepts. Just because something is perfectly legal doesn't make it moral. Or for that matter just because something is illegal doesn't necessarily make it immoral.

> Playing within the rules created by society is not morally wrong.

There are people who honestly believe that? It’s not that simple, it really isn’t.

I, for example, think there are many immoral but legal things and I want it to stay that way. The law is not supposed to perfectly mirror our morality, that would be a clusterfuck, tyranny, and otherwise a really bad idea. (For example: I think not tipping in the restaurant is immoral. I, however, never ever want that to become a law. Just one example.)

In short: Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because it’s not right, doesn’t mean it should be illegal.

Taxes are purely a construct of law though. The only reason it's immoral not to pay taxes is because it's immoral to break the law, at least if the law is just. But we're not talking about people breaking the law, we're talking about people obeying the law.

Think of it this way: if you can get an effective tax rate of x% by doing this and y% by doing that, and x < y, what's the moral difference between doing what you need to do to pay x% and the government changing the tax rate so you pay x% either way? It's not a question of what's the most moral percentage to pay in tax, it's a question of whether or not you're defying the law, which you aren't in either case. If the government lowered the tax rate to x% and you decided to cut out the middleman and just pay it, no one would howl at you to voluntarily pay more. So why do people howl at you for obeying other laws that allow you to effectively lower your effective tax rate to the same amount?

The reason it is immoral to pay taxes is that you are still benefiting from the existence of the government but putting the burden of supporting it on others.

You personally may agree or disagree with this, but that's what someone probably means when they say it is immoral to avoid paying taxes, even if it is perfectly legal. Taxes are part of the general social contract of our society, and aggressively finding ways to avoid paying them tends to a tragedy of the commons type situation.

You're thinking at country level. If you expand the thought to global level, the supposed immorality disappears - in this case, the taxes are just paid in another country, at a lower rate, but it still helps a part of society...

> The only reason it's immoral not to pay taxes is because it's immoral to break the law, at least if the law is just

Surely it's also immoral because it's moral to contribute to the society you benefit from, particularly when the laws are constructed to attempt to make you do so, even when there are loopholes?

If it had to do with contributing to the society around you, surely it would be the same obligation regardless of the tax laws, wouldn't it? Yet no one voluntarily pays more than the tax rate, and nearly everyone takes all the deductions and tax credits they can.

Right - the difference between the two is that deductions and tax credits are explicitly entered into the law to define what someone should be paying. The corporate tax rates that Apple pays in California are instead a reflection of the law's inability to effectively extract the money that society wants to - loopholes are involuntarily, while tax deductions are intended.

> deductions and tax credits are explicitly entered into the law to define what someone should be paying.

So if a company follow the law and they gets tax deduction, it means that that's the tax the society agree that the company should be paying, right?

> loopholes are involuntarily, while tax deductions are intended.

So can the company exercise tax deduction without being called using a loophole? Is it ever intended for tax deduction to be okay for a company?

Of course it's often intended for a tax deduction to be okay. I'm not quite sure what the thrust of your argument is - are you trying to imply that loopholes as a concept are invalid?

No, it’s not necessarily immoral to break the law. There is it again, the error to try and map morality to laws perfectly.

Whether or not not paying taxes is immoral (by abusing obvious loopholes) is different from the law.

The best way I can visualize it is like playing a game of poker.

Bluffing is misrepresenting what you have to fool your opponent into something you don't, or more commonly, something better than you actually have. There are a variety of ways to bluff, with either betting patterns or by outright lying verbally. There are different rules in different casinos that determine whether or not you're allowed to talk about your hand, so exactly how you perform your bluffs may be limited.

Regardless, you should bluff, at least occasionally. The person who never bluffs is likely limited in the amount of money they can make as everyone will fold to the always truthful player.

Ignoring the societal questionability of poker on the whole, some poker players consider bluffing to be immoral. Generally, and certainly the people who recently fell for a bluff might feel so more strongly than those who just successfully bluffed but, and this is important, bluffing is within the rules of the game.

So long as you're not breaking the rules, there is no penalty for being clever.

That was a nice explanation of why what’s moral doesn’t map to what's legal. I’m not sure what your point is, though.

I agree with the SCOTUS sentiment, but in other related areas, strict adherence to the law with the underlying intent to remain legal but avoid the spirit of the law has been cracked down upon.

In the case of cash transactions, with the 10k reporting limits, people are now routinely prosecuted for "structuring" their >10k transactions into a series of <10k transactions, even when it is clearly demonstrated that there is no underlying criminal activity. There have been cases where it is just cantankerous believers in privacy being prosecuted.

For my part, I'm on the side of the tax avoiders & believers in privacy, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the government's views/regulations on tax avoidance come around to their current policies on currency controls.