But it is morally wrong because it is that same society that enables me to make my money in the first place.
Simple, right?
"The legal right of an individual to decrease the amount of what would otherwise be his taxes or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted." - US Supreme Court
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
Whether or not not paying taxes is immoral (by abusing obvious loopholes) is different from the law.
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.
There is a singular lack of realization about the societies in which we live, possibly because it does feel like every man for himself most days. The societal web that makes us interdependent and upon which we rely without knowing it isn't as apparent.
Addendum: there's a lot of confusion about the differences between something being legal and something being moral/ethical in the responses to this post. Legal too often simply means exploiting loopholes.
Given those conditions, I don't feel there's anything immoral about doing everything legal to pay less in taxes. I suspect things are different where you live.
The military keeps foreigners from invading/suicide bombing and thus creates stability which lets you make money. Social safety nets including welfare, social security, etc, create the same sort of stability since there's less of a likelihood a starving person or angry elderly woman will rob you, etc, etc.
I'm not saying social safety nets aren't valuable. I'm saying that the current implementation does little to encourage or help people who use them to move on to something productive. I'm also saying that social security is an unsustainable pyramid scheme and that medicare is both inefficient and a poor allocation of resources.
I don't necessarily have solutions in mind for the latter problems; they're hard problems and not in a field with which I have experience. What I am saying is that I don't feel obligated to pay any more in taxes than I have to when on the order of 90% of the money will go toward things that I believe aren't constructive.
Oddly enough, New York has implemented an effective Henry George-esque tax system: to merely exist in the city, you have to live in fairly pricey real estate, and the taxes your landlord pays are effectively passed through to you by market rents. Other places have much cheaper real estate, so they don't have the same dynamic.