> How is anything about tax avoidance ethical?

This is a bit odd for two reasons.

1. Taking steps to minimize your taxes is neither ethical or unethical, it's just basic common sense. It's like choosing to buy the cheaper apple when you go to the store. The whole reason why we have sin taxes and tax breaks is because legislators believe that it influences behavior and so they create this byzantine tax code in order to try to manage behavior. I guess whether you believe contributing to your 401K or claiming the mortgage interest deduction is immoral depends on your ethical code. To me, this is a category error -- if you think financial management can either increase or decrease your morality then you have a very decadent (and broken) moral code.

One can argue that such a complex tax code is bad policy, because it results in such a complex system that you need teams of lawyers to really understand it and take advantage of it, meaning that for ordinary people it's not worth it and the economy as a whole wastes far too much on tax professionals. But that never seems to stop anyone from clamoring for tax breaks for their pet cause.

2. The whole point of globalism as an enterprise is to support (and encourage) cross border capital flows. It is a system intended to allow foreigners purchasing up capital in the home country and home citizens doing the same overseas. These cross border capital flows finance trade deficits (without them, there would be no trade deficits).

But different nations have very different tax codes so this encourages a race to the bottom. Much like outsourcing labor. This race to the bottom effect is not some secret that requires an expose, it is an intended feature of the system. Why I am shocked, shocked, that americans would invest their money in the jurisdiction that yields the greatest tax-adjusted return. Just shocked!

This is why many people (such as myself) are opposed to globalism, but we are painted as silly xenophobes who don't want to eat French Brie. Well, OK, you wanted globalism -- this is globalism. And the only alternative to globalism is nationalism. Now one can make a claim that globalism as a value system is unethical and that only nationalism (or even better localism -- let each region have its own currency and borders and trade policy -- is ethical), but an individual who is stuck in a legal code that encourages and subsidizes globalism is not acting ethically or unethically when he buys a cheap TV from china, a car from Japan or sends his money to the Bahamas, as he is stuck with the tab of globalism (low interest rates, de-industrialization, political unrest, decline of solidarity, undermining of democracy, global financial crises) so he may as well enjoy the benefits -- access to the benefits of low wages in China and to the benefits of low taxes in the Bahamas. If you think one is unethical, then what about the other? And if you are being paid wages or earning returns determined by competition from the world, why not take advantage of cheap products and cheap taxes overseas? You cannot create your own private economic system just because you think the current one is a disaster.

Bottom line, if you don't like this type of tax arbitrage, then put a stop to it by discouraging (taxing) cross border capital flows. It would also put a stop to outsourcing and cheap TVs as well, and you would be instantly painted as a nationalist trade-war fighting xenophobe, but this is how you solve the problem, not by appealing to people to "buy American" or "store their wealth" in America with some faux ethical argument. Appeals to personal virtue to pay more than is needed (whether for TVs or taxes) ring pretty hollow.