Global Dodger Derby: How the World’s Elite Turn Avoidance into an Olympic Sport
Dodger, noun: a person who artfully sidesteps consequences, taxes, truth, or traffic wardens. The word has sprinted far from its humble 18th-century London origins—when it merely described fleet-footed pickpockets on the Strand—and is now doing a full Usain-Bolt victory lap around the planet. From the boardrooms of Zug to the yacht marinas of Limassol, dodging has become the unofficial Olympic sport of our age, complete with off-shore medals.
Consider the global league table. In Buenos Aires, a commodities trader in a Montblanc pen can “relocate” soy profits to Montevideo faster than you can say “¡Dónde está la factura?” Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, a former colonial banker politely coughs into his Hermès mask while re-domiciling his private-equity fund to the Cayman Islands—population 71,432, registered companies 100,000, sense of irony zero. The maneuver is so routine that local toddlers learn two words in kindergarten: “please” and “Delaware LLC.”
Across the Atlantic, European finance ministers gather in Brussels like medieval monks debating the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead—except the pinhead is a 15 % global minimum tax and the angels all have private jets. Every spring they announce “historic” crackdowns. Every summer the dodgers hire new accountants who bill by the lunar eclipse. It’s a renewable-resource industry: the only carbon-neutral circle of hell.
The art form has regional accents, naturally. In Moscow, the well-connected dodge sanctions the way Muscovites dodge summer rain: with a shrug and a really big umbrella. In Lagos, internet scammers—sorry, “digital entrepreneurs”—dodge Interpol by switching SIM cards the way other people switch socks. And in Washington, members of Congress dodge stock-disclosure rules so deftly that their portfolios outperform Warren Buffett’s, presumably because Buffett foolishly relies on public information.
Technology, that great equalizer, has democratized dodging. Once the exclusive craft of aristocrats and oligarchs, it’s now available to anyone with a VPN and a flexible moral GPS. A teenager in Manila can ghost-write college essays for American students, dodge Turnitin, and get paid in Tether—all before breakfast. The gig economy meets the jig economy.
Yet the consequences refuse to stay dodged. Every billion parked in Bermuda is a hospital unbuilt in Birmingham. Every unpaid VAT euro in Athens is another pothole that swallows a motorbike. The International Monetary Fund, whose economists can spot a rounding error at 30,000 feet, estimates that governments lose roughly $600 billion a year to corporate tax avoidance—enough to vaccinate the planet twice, or subsidize Elon Musk’s next mood swing. The money surfaces eventually: in London penthouses lit like Versailles, in super-yachts longer than the average Maltese ferry, in NFTs of cartoon rocks that sell for more than actual rocks quarried by underpaid laborers in Rajasthan.
Still, the moral scoreboard is tricky. One man’s tax dodger is another’s freedom fighter against kleptocracy. If you live under a regime that funds secret police with your withholding, creative accounting becomes civil disobedience with an Excel file. Context, as ever, is the difference between “evader” and “entrepreneur.”
So where does this leave the rest of us, the undodging masses dutifully declaring every freelance invoice and overripe banana? Precisely where we’ve always been: underwriting the circus. Our taxes pay for the regulators who draft the loopholes that our bosses use to shrink their taxes, which in turn raises our taxes. It’s the Ouroboros of modern civics—a snake eating its own Form 1040.
In the end, dodging isn’t merely a financial technique; it’s a worldview. It proclaims that rules are speed bumps, not guardrails, and that society is someone else’s problem. Until the day the satellites overhead, owned by rival dodgers, finally track every last invoice, the game will continue. And when that day comes, the truly skilled will simply dodge the satellites.
