There are many lies in neoliberal repertoire, but one of the biggest is that the state and the market are in any way distinct and separate entities that exist independently of one another instead of merely two different aspects of the same system. It’s not so much avoiding taxes, although I’m aware I’m arguing semantics, but that the tax code is functioning as it is intended to by the people who wrote it.

It’s really funny, practically everyone understands that corporate lobbyists write our legislation and the rich and power get exactly the kind of laws they want, but they don’t often think that this applies to the tax laws as well. It is comically naive to think that you could let people get as wealthy and powerful as the billionaires in this country have become and that they wouldn’t use that same wealth and power to control the government at every level, making a mockery of democracy.

The ideology wants to understnad the economy and money as governed by immutable laws because then when bad things happen there’s no one to blame. All misfortunes that befall us from capitalism are like the will of God (or Nature, if you’re more atheistic, they serve the same purpose). In actuality money/finance/the economy is a set of political and legal institutions.

This is something I disagree with Marx quite strongly on. In spite of how hard he tried to critique capitalism he still considered money to be “real” instead of just a legal arrangement. I’m really rambling, but it is also my belief that this is why his theories on crisis never panned out. He thought the money was real and could cause a crisis that would undermine capitalism itself instead of a legal entity which could simply be changed and disregarded when it caused problems for the people in power (think 2008 when all the free market rhetoric went out the window and banks got bailed out).