John McAfee died in a Spanish prison today from a suspected suicide (“John McAfee, Software Pioneer Turned Fugitive, Dies in a Spanish Prison,” New York Times, June 23, 2021). He had just lost a legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States after being prosecuted for tax evasion. He was also charged with securities fraud and money laundering.
I don’t know which, if any, among the offenses he was suspected of over the years, the eccentric entrepreneur was actually guilty of. It would not be overly surprising to discover that it is getting riskier to be eccentric in our over-regulated societies. He unsuccessfully ran for the Libertarian nomination before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. (Not that you should hold that against me, but he was one of my Twitter and Facebook followers! His photograph above is taken from his Facebook homepage.)
In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wrote about eccentricity:
Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. …
I would hypothesize it is also proportional to the level of entrepreneurship.
In a tweet of June 16, McAfee’s wrote:
The US believes I have hidden crypto. I wish I did but it has dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association. I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.
Regarding the charge of tax evasion, it is interesting to note that in Switzerland, tax evasion—“forgetting” to declare income, for example—is not a crime, but an administrative infraction. Only “tax fraud,” with involves using falsified documents, is criminally prosecutable. One would think that if the income tax is claimed to be voluntary, such a rule would be natural.
READER COMMENTS
Chris
Jun 23 2021 at 9:13pm
That, along with the location of Aleppo, would surprise Gary Johnson.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 23 2021 at 9:17pm
Chris: Thanks for noting the error. I am making the correction now—I mean to my own error and the NYT‘s, which is not “Aleppo”!
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 23 2021 at 9:44pm
Since is is not claimed that the income tax is “voluntary” (at east I have never heard such a claim) intentionally not declaring income IS a crime, with the government having the burden of proof of intent. If the tax were “voluntary,” [which is not the same as “acknowledged to be legitimate”] what would “fraudulent documents” mean?
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Jun 23 2021 at 10:17pm
For many years, whenever a defendant would attempt to invoke his rights under the Fifth Amendment in order to prevent his income tax forms from being used as evidence against him, the IRS would declare, and the court would agree, that filing had been a voluntary act.
Eventually, someone brought such rulings to bear in a case where the defendant had been charged with failure to file. The courts ultimately responded by ink-blotting the Fifth Amendment in such application.
But there remains a body of old documents in which various officials declare that filing — or even simply the income tax itself — is wonderfully voluntary.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 23 2021 at 10:41pm
Thomas: Interestingly, the government now uses the misleading expression of “voluntary compliance.” See J.T. Manhire, “What Does Voluntary Tax Compliance Mean?: A Government Perspective,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online 164:11 (2015):
David Seltzer
Jun 24 2021 at 11:37am
The pantheon of eccentrics; Einstein, Jobs, Lincoln, Musk, Edison, FLLW, Andrew Wiles, I could go on but…
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