Or you know...you could pay your taxes and stop stealing from the rest of us.
I'm certainly not excusing his actions (and I'm sure he dodged taxes in many ways), but I have to say that as a Spanish citizen having lived in the US, Ireland, and now Japan, the US tax code is batshit insane.
If US citizenship has a whole lot of advantages that mean you want to keep it, then the price is perfectly clear up front: you are bound to the US tax code.
The tax evasion for which he was indicted covered 2014 through 2018; while there are gaps in the information I can find quickly about his residency, in 2015 he apparently resided in Tennessee (and in 2013 in Oregon). So even if we were to accept that taxation of nonresident citizens was fundamentally illegitimate, that wouldn't invalidate all (possibly not any, again, I can't find any nob-US residency information in the covered period, only once he announced he was on the run from the tax investigation in 2019, and some before 2013.)
And even if all the tax allegations were grounded in illegitimate taxation, there's also the securities fraud charges.
How can topics as complex as transgender rights, or abortion be all boiled into a single digit of information.
And then I'm stealing if I don't consent to a system I by all statistical means have no control over!?
You can also move.
As for McAfee, I would guess he did explore his legal options and they were probably no easier to swallow than the path he took. E.g. personal bankruptcy if he could even afford the taxes before he would be allowed to renounce.
Not sure if "meme" (US civil religion) or "organization" (US government) is the better description of the actor here.
Also a thought about how apparent inconsistencies, or hypocrisy, can sometimes be explained by finding an underlying true "motive" that explains the various "inconsistent" behaviors. (One example: People who are liberal in their adopted country but conservative in their home country, can be understood as simply being self-interested.) Though in this case the "actor" is not really a person, but an organization or memeplex.
> I don't know many people who'd describe the US immigration system as welcoming.
That's a fair point, which undermines the idea. Well, it's debatable, but I get what you mean. Yes: The (blue-state) norms ("welcome everyone!") don't match the reality (actually it's pretty hard). Say, if you're a high-skilled student from India you wait years in a queue; that doesn't seem particularly "welcoming". (On the other hand, it's easy to win the visa lottery if you're from Kazakhstan. I digress.) On a relative scale we might still call the US welcoming though; its identity is much more built around immigration than other countries' identities are, citizenship requirements are much lower than many other "developed" countries, and even the language -- a mishmash of Romance and Germanic, with a phonetic alphabet, inherited from a trading empire -- is easy to use at a basic level (though its inconsistencies do pose problems for mastery), which again helps spread/assimilation. And in the US you at least can't openly act like your country represents a specific genetic/ethnic group (unlike in many other countries, where that identification is tacitly and unapologetically assumed).
It's the "cultural/mimetic dynamics" aspect that was interesting. The "P(A -> B) >> P(B -> A)" thing.
That this is additionally connected to tax revenue is also interesting. Money enters. Which is another fascinating subject.
These things -- populations, memes, capital flows, births, deaths, conversions -- all flow and swirl and transmutate around, like the weather. I am on the lookout for absorbing states.