&gt; Suppose you were to start &quot;a hedge fund with a university attached to it&quot;, in order to use the university&#x27;s non-profit status to minimize paying taxes. What would that look like?<p>As long as all the funds went towards the chartered goals of the non-profit, it would look like a really good idea for sustainable funding.<p>I don&#x27;t see any reasonable basis on which the article&#x27;s comparison makes sense.  They compared the tax <i>not</i> paid by a registered non-profit with tax funds taken from taxpayers and <i>spent</i> on public universities, such that if someone doesn&#x27;t pay .  Apples and oranges.  To look at it another way, the private university provides what most people consider a &quot;better&quot; education without receiving any public funds; clearly we need <i>more</i> such institutions if possible.<p>Apart from that, based on past evidence, collecting such taxes would not replace taxes collected from others to support a tax decrease; rather, it would just increase the total size of the budget.<p>Looking at tax you wish you could collect but have no legal right to and salivating over it makes as much sense as looking at the contents of someone else&#x27;s bank account and wishing it was yours.