Wit & Attitude Quote by Esther Dyson

Dyson is doing that very Silicon Valley thing: treating a moral problem like a systems bug. The line isn’t an excuse for smuggling or tax dodging so much as an indictment of the incentive structure that makes “honesty” feel like a luxury good. The key move is her blunt, almost engineer’s phrasing - “almost no way,” “such a disadvantage” - which frames illegality less as deviance than as a predictable output of bad design.

Her target is the mismatch between law and market reality. Import regimes are often written with political symbolism in mind (protect domestic industry, look tough on trade, raise revenue) but enforced unevenly and laced with loopholes. In that environment, compliance becomes a voluntary surcharge. Dyson’s subtext is that the system selects for rule-benders: if your competitor can shave costs by routing goods through a friendly jurisdiction or “reclassifying” shipments, you either follow suit or lose. The “huge amounts of effort” line is the tell; she’s pointing at wasted human capital - lawyers, consultants, shell companies, paperwork artistry - energy that could have gone into actual innovation.

Calling the laws “stupid” isn’t just snark. It’s a diagnosis: when regulation is unrealistic or contradictory, it doesn’t produce virtue, it produces workarounds. The deeper intent is reformist, not nihilist: align rules with economic incentives, simplify and rationalize import and tax structures, and you reduce the shadow economy not by moralizing, but by making honesty competitively viable.