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.
Gradually I came to realize that the process of saving the desert of the human heart and revegetating the actual desert is actually the same thing.
"Why are breakfast food breakfast foods?" I asked them. "Like, why don't we have curry for breakfast?" "Hazel, eat." "But why?" I asked. "I mean seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it's a breakfast sandwich."
I ground my faith upon God's word, and not upon the church.
I get the urge for going/But I never seem to go.
Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.
There are some facts that will never change. One fact is that you are forgiven. If you are in Christ, when he sees you, your sins are covered-he doesn't see them. He sees you better than you see yourself.
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