The irresistible rise of the repugnant tax dodger The comedian Jimmy Carr, heckled by an audience recently about how little he pays in taxes, snapped back: "I pay what I have to and not a penny more." For the past fortnight, The Times has been publishing accounts showing that tax avoidance has become routine among Britain's moguls, stars and footballers. Mr Carr was exhibit A. He has until recently sheltered up to £3.3m in a Jersey-based operation called K2. There are tricks for ducking taxes everywhere, but they are almost diabolically complex in the UK. Some big earners take part of their income in the form of a "loan," paying tax only on the interest. That is one of the services K2 offered. There are deductions for independent film companies and high-tech start-ups. There are privileges for "non-domiciled" status, which British residents sometimes inherit from their foreign-descended parents. While Mr Carr has admitted to an "error of judgment," not even The Times alleges he has done anything illegal. Mr Carr's not-a-penny-more remarks implied that his tax avoidance (a natural human tendency) is something quite different from tax evasion (which can be a crime). Such distinctions go over badly with taxpayers whose money has gone to stabilise banks and balance public accounts. However, Mr Carr, alas, is mostly right. The lines between the avoidance and evasion are easily blurred, in a way that favours the savvy and the powerful. It is a standing problem in any state that has a Byzantine tax code. Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons public accounts committee, complains that the state's "tax demands are seen as an aggravating irritant, not a positive contribution to be valued." Everyone professes to think that Ms Hodge is pushing against an open door. In his Budget, George Osborne, the UK chancellor, described tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance as "morally repugnant." Danny Alexander, Treasury secretary, compared tax dodgers to benefits cheats. This consensus position was first laid out by US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said: "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilisation. The problem is that where taxes are decided by legislation, they result from a tug-of-war between factions, not from ageless moral wisdom about what constitutes a "fair share." The UK's offsetting-mortgage rule and its gift-aid scheme, the US subsidies for ethanol production and alpaca farming - you won't find those things in the Bible. And nowadays, as the tax lawyer Louis Eisenstein put it in The Ideologies of Taxation (1961): "Various groups are firmly persuaded that their functions are peculiarly vital to the progress of civilisation." Think of entrepreneurs of a certain disposition, who believe they have done enough for society simply by drawing breath. They tend to think the state is just and well run only to the extent that their own tax bills are low. David Cameron, the prime minister, plays into this kind of thinking when he offers to welcome high earners put off by the tax rises that France's François Hollande has promised. In this, Mr Cameron resembles the 17th-century monarchs who welcomed the Huguenots to Britain after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He also resembles the accountants who aided Mr Carr's tax dodge. Worldwide, the problem of tax avoidance and evasion is severe. Globalisation helps make it so. The G20 set a priority of shutting down bank secrecy at its London meetings in 2009, but the total deposits in tax-haven countries seem not to have fallen since then. The US is trying to uncover "offshored" money through its new Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which is causing headaches for US expatriates and the banks that serve them. Italy's Mario Monti has launched raids on a variety of off-the-books businesses since he took office. A century ago, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter spoke of a "crisis of the tax state." The central European tax system, Schumpeter noted, arose from a consensus that feudal princes needed more resources to defend against sophisticated mercenary armies. Today, a revolution is being carried out in the name of the principle that "information wants to be free." So, apparently, do the people and the fortunes that go along with it. If rich people are ceasing to pay taxes it might mean either that states are growing too weak to constrain the rich, or that the rich now feel their primary duty is to their (international) class rather than to their country. However, this crisis of fiscal legitimacy is more widespread than governments" favouring the so-called 1 per cent. It extends to the busboys and house cleaners who make up the "black economy," too. Citizens may no longer think government services are "worth" what government says they are. Some of them, apparently, are coming to think that nothing is a fair price for the services government has lately offered them.