The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that evading taxes is seen as a clever strategy with benefits, reflecting on the practicality of intellect.
John Maynard Keynes highlights the paradox that, while avoiding taxes is often viewed negatively, it is considered a significant intellectual activity because of the rewards associated with it. This statement raises questions about ethics, the nature of value in society, and how cleverness is sometimes applied in self-serving ways, especially regarding financial gain.
In practice
During a seminar on economic ethics, this quote can illustrate the complexities of tax avoidance.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.
The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.
But we know that freedom cannot be served by the devices of the tyrant. As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedoms defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
The less I have, the freer I am to do whatever I want to do.
β¦. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
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