Tax lawyer
A friend of chicken licken, as the saying goes. These folk lie awake at night fantasising about Tolley’s Tax Handbook, and worry that excise might be retrospectively levied on equity trades in India and that the IRS might recharacterise equity swaps as disguised cash transactions. Either of these things might happen, of course, just like the sky might fall in on our heads.
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance. 
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Now as you all know the Jolly Contrarian doesn’t like to generalise, but — okay, okay, the JC loves to generalise, I admit it — but, tax lawyers really are, uniformly, and consistently, a bit weird. But weird in a good way. They are weird so we don’t have to be. They’re weird in the same way ninjas[1] are a bit weird — that any people who have devoted their lives to the selfless pursuit of any kind of esoteric knowledge are a bit weird. It takes a weird sort of personality to devote your life to imputation credits and so on, after all.
In a rare example of archetype congruity, all tax lawyers are subject matter experts, and all tax lawyers are tax ninjas. This is because no-one who isn’t a tax lawyer can bear the prospect of getting close enough to the topic to know whether a professed tax lawyer in fact knows what she is talking about, far less care, and as such there is no means of determining what a given tax position is other than asking a tax lawyer — any tax lawyer — to tell you, and thereafter it cannot be gainsaid.
The famous counter-intuitivity of tax law — how nothing seems to make any sense to the laity, however hard they can bear to look at it — is indicative, in the alternative, of the following facts:
- (i) any understanding of tax law requires an ineffable ninjadom that cannot be apprehended, much less appreciated by anyone else; ergo tax expertise is somehow Godly and pure; or
- (ii) tax law is an total shower and anyone who claims expertise in tax matters is an outright charlatan. There is no God; to the contrary we are not just close to the abyss that yawns away below the turtles, but staring directly at it.
See also
References
- ↑ Real Japanese ninjas, that is, not ironically labelled ISDA ninjas though, come to think of it, we ISDA ninjas are a bit weird too.