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.
Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.
Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.
This moment - the one you're experiencing right now - is the culmination of all the moments you have experienced in the past. This moment is as it is because the entire universe is as it is.
because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
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