Paul Romer Updates An Old Adage

"Give someone a fish, you feed them for a day.
Teach someone to fish, you destroy another aquatic ecosystem."

From his paper "Process, Responsibility, and Myron’s Law," presented at the International Monetary Funds recent conference on "Macro and Growth Policies in the Wake of the Crisis" (you can view a video here.)

"Myron's Law," according to Romer, was formulated by Myron Scholes (of the Black-Scholes formula for pricing complex financial instruments, and it says: "Asymptotically, any finite tax code collects zero revenue."