[hackinthebochs]

An analogous situation would be an NSA member sitting on a committee developing an encryption standard. The NSA member suggests a change that the committee members do not fully comprehend the implications of. They accept the standard and henceforth the NSA can crack the resulting cryptosystem. By your reasoning the NSA carries no moral fault here.

Man, the mental gymnastics people will go through to justify tax avoidance is astounding. Those with greater knowledge in an assumed non-adversarial system have a moral imperative to disseminate that knowledge to the others in the system. Otherwise taking advantage of the information imbalance and the other party's implied trust is unethical.

Just because something is legal does not make it right. Those who would outsource their moral thinking to laws are a sorry lot.

[ihsw]

Morals and ethics have no say in determining whether to pay taxes -- if you pay too much then the government complains, if you don't pay enough then the government complains. Where exactly does right and wrong fit into this equation?

There are no mental gymnastics in determining how much taxes you have to pay, the only thing that matters is how much you pay.

[hackinthebochs]

>Morals and ethics have no say in determining whether to pay taxes

Morals/ethics do have a determination whether the concept of tax is ethical or not, which would then determine the ethics of avoiding said tax. If you take the position that tax is ethical (as a member of a society...) then it is at least on the surface unethical to avoid the intended tax rate (shifting burden, freeloading, etc).