One practical way for me to evade taxes is to start a startup and sell it, which means my income will be taxed at the much lower capital gains rate.
Uh, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. For one, starting a startup and selling it has rather broader consequences than a typical tax avoidance strategy. That's like suggesting moving to a third world country to cut down on your daily living expenses - your food and accommodation costs may indeed decrease but it significantly changes your life in all kinds of other ways as well. For another this would not be tax evasion but tax avoidance which has the rather significant difference of being entirely legal.
I'm fully aware of the distinction; I was playing with the ambiguous distinction between evasion and avoidance (as you say, the distinction being that avoidance is legal) by using the language of the person I replied to. I was trying to imply that there is no profound difference between avoidance and evasion, just the definitions given by the rule of law.
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