Richard Murphy gives us his April Fool.
The thing which I find really amusing about it is that I\’m absolutely damn certain that one of the first things someone\’s going to do when the private Moon base(s) get going is exactly that: explore the very interesting possibilities of tax dodging.
I remember reading a rather old science fiction tale of a race to the moon by the major powers of the day (Britain amongst them). One point that was made is that the crew contrived to stay on the moon long enough to avoid paying tax on some of their earnings.
That story was by the great Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died just a few days ago.
I can’t remember the name, but it’s one pf a series of shorts he wrote about colonising the moon during the 50s (I think).
Robert Hale
Bearing in mind the utter tomfoolery the man publishes on his site the other 364 days a year, how can you be sure he’s joking? I mean, my reaction to a normal Richard Murphy piece is to boggle in incredulity that someone who (we assume) manages to dress and feed himself, can have written something so silly.
He touched on it again in one of the 2001 episodes (it might have been a deleted chapter). On the way to saturn the crew have to negotiate with the taxman over exactly how long they’ve been away from the tax base.
Tax was one of the reasons he moved to Sri Lanka.