David Mitchell on Tax Avoidance from The Last Leg

But that's not how legal systems works. If you're caught running a red light, you can't argue that "many other people are doing it, too". Similarly, if a dozen cars run a red light at the same time, and only you are stopped, the best you can do is argue discrimination; you still broke the law, and you're still culpable, and it's the police's prerogative to catch whomever they can. That's also not how legal precedent works. Legal precedents in the US are derived from court decisions, not whether something is occurring en masse. I'm not even sure why precedents work, given that there's no "case" here. Your misplaced cynicism about moral outrage becomes more obvious if you replace tax evasion with something much worse, e.g. child labour or human trafficking, something which is in fact prevalent, though probably not within Apple's sphere. But the moral outrage exists because these papers expose something so blatantly immoral that people are genuinely surprised and dismayed at the sheer scale at which rich companies and people are stockpiling money in secret. We know human trafficking occurs every day, all over the world; if someone uncovers a big network of, say, politicans involved in this trafficking, aren't we right to be outraged? Is it a "failure to see the world for what it is" just because it's accepted that evil things happen? How blasé can one get? Re "don't you think they are entitled to try to save as much of it as they can?", this confuses morality with legality. As D