&gt; &quot;Yes, but I&#x27;m not talking about evasion. Evasion would be illegally saying &quot;I earned nothing&quot; and hiding the money. Tax optimizaton by out-smarting the system is legal though.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a difference between the spirit of the law and the implementation of the law. If tax laws were perfectly implemented then the loopholes would not exist, but that doesn&#x27;t necessarily make the intention behind the laws unclear.<p>You&#x27;ve decided to follow the legal options available to you rather than honouring the intended use of the laws. You can call it &#x27;tax optimisation&#x27; if you want, but it&#x27;s just tax evasion under a different name. I can understand why it&#x27;s tempting, I&#x27;ve probably done similar acts before on a smaller scale (things like avoiding customs duty on some posted items), not something I&#x27;m proud of.<p>&gt; &quot;We&#x27;re still having an extra tax on sparkling wine here in Germany. It was introduced in 1901 to finance the German Imperial Navy to rival the British Empire [1] ...&quot;<p>If you have such laws, then efforts should be made to remove them. Is it harder to remove them than using tax loopholes? Yes, but it&#x27;s still the right thing to do. Don&#x27;t German citizens have the right to start a citizens initiative?