Keeping Your Own Money NOT Handing It Over To The Tax Man

Most people trying to make a crust online (or offline for that matter) are so focused on doing just that, they ignore taking simple steps to ensure that they hang on to just as much of it as they can. Instead, they hand over large lumps of their hard-earned money in tax, usually in one of two mistaken beliefs. Either:

1. Its a good thing, a sure sign of a civilised society. Or,
2. If they dont, the Feds will get them, fining them, expropriating their assets, maybe even jailing them.

I'd respectfully suggest that those two reasons are mutually exclusive. Visiting penal sanctions on citizens because they decline to hand over their money to you could hardly be regarded as the mark of a civilised society. In fact it might more properly be regarded as the mark of a criminal one!

So how does this situation arise, and how can the thinking man or woman avoid it?

Most e-mails I receive regarding business opportunities trumpet the benefits of being an entrepreneur. Now the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines entrepreneur as follows:

A person who undertakes or controls a business and bears the risk of profit or loss.

Yes, thats risk, profit and loss. All things that people with their own businesses regard as being as inevitable as night following day.

Interestingly, the SOED contains no definition of rentseeker. Still, key the term in to Google and youll discover that it refers to people who want to be paid to take your money for a service that you would not yourself choose to pay for.

Now lets just talk this one through:

1. They want to be paid. In practice, they dont just wish to be paid, but to enjoy substantial pension rights. All of this is funded by the taxpayer.
2. In return for these payments, they undertake to extract further sums of taxpayers money to provide what they describe as services.
3. Critically, taxpayers would not, either as individuals or collectively, freely choose to pay for these services. If they did, they would do so, in the marketplace.
4. The money is therefore taken by coercion.
5. They lack any concept whatever of risk (at least to themselves) or of profit (to taxpayers). Loss, on the other hand, is guaranteed to each and every taxpayer.

Now, in any other context, this process is known as robbery, or, more subtly, fraud.

After all, it IS your money, right? Well not according to Uncle Sam, or, depending where youre based, your nearest friendly local equivalent.

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