Like most moral questions, It's Complicated. Even straight personal theft has a range, from the obviously amoral (snatching an old lady's purse) to the morally

Like most moral questions, It's Complicated. Even straight personal theft has a range, from the obviously amoral (snatching an old lady's purse) to the morally ambiguous (Robin Hood stealing from aristocrats to feed starving peasants). Are there legitimate reasons for tax avoidance? Yes. For example, if you were rich but had the misfortune to live in the regime-controlled part of Syria, you'd be stuck there now, and nobody would fault you for trying your very best to move your assets elsewhere to avoid funding a corrupt and murderous government. So to your abstract question about whether tax evasion is theft, I'd say "sometimes". However, the specific cases we're talking about here, revealed by the Mossack Fonseca leak, were definitely theft. There's a perverse trend of rich people in rich, democratic countries who consider themselves above taxation. They're in free countries, and they're free to leave: if they really wanted to take a moral stand against taxation, they could pull an Eduardo Saverin, give up their citizenship, and emigrate to a low-tax country. Instead they stay and lie about their income. The poor don't pay taxes because they can't. The middle and upper middle class pay taxes, often a huge fraction of their income, because they can't not. Only the truly rich have the flexibility and resources to set up, say, a system of Panamanian shell companies. It becomes even more starkly amoral and flagrantly hypocritical when elected officials do it.