Let’s say you have two men who want to exchange money. One of them walks over to the next and gives him some cash, end of story. That’s called business.
Let’s repeat the scenario but let’s put a third man in who says that he must collect a small percentage of the cash before the other two do their transaction. The third man has nothing to do with the first two men but he wants a share to do “good things”. That’s called taxation.
Exact same scenario but the first man instead of handing money to the second he simply drops a bag on the floor and the second man picks it up both acting as nothing is happening. The third man frowns suspiciously and demands to see what’s in the bag. The first two men refuse. That’s called tax evasion.
Let’s repeat the scenario but let’s now put a monkey in with the three men. The first man gives the money to his monkey and the monkey runs away. Another, similar monkey (really the same one) then runs up to the second man and hands him a wad of cash. The second man smiles tips his hat to the third man and the first and walks away. That’s called tax avoidance.
Let’s repeat the scenario but let’s say the third man now demands a very small sum for every time a monkey takes the money or if a monkey gives any of the men money. It is called a monkey hop tax. That’s call regulation.
Now the two original men instead of bringing out a monkey, bring out a chimpanzee who instead of hopping is leaping. The third man looks on because he doesn’t have enough money collected from taxation or monkey hop taxation to stand there forever.
A fourth man is tapping him on the shoulder saying that he has done a bad job collecting and spending the taxes. The third man has to wait a few months to add an ape leap tax as well. As soon as the ape-leap tax is passed then the two original men start using a donkey to ferry the money and the fourth man is now in charge of collecting the taxes as well as looking out for the illegal dead drops as well as making sure the regular handovers are properly taxed.
The third man is also promising to take it easy on the two original men if they only let him oversee the money exchanges again. The two original men are planning to, as time goes on, use fish, birds and even plants to ferry the money between themselves. No “good” is ever done because with all of the rules being made and bypassed, the men involved have to eat while they continuously try to catch each other out and of course feed the well trained animals. That’s called the world we live in today.
