Lawyer Fees Soar To $1,500 An Hour

From a recent post by Robert Wood:

Legal costs keep rising, and top lawyer hourly rates are soaring. In fact, legal fees have crossed $1,500 an hour. Not long ago $1,000 seemed high. And just recently, the City of Baltimore took flak for paying outside lawyers up to $1,200 an hour in its Justice Department probe. 

Your tax lawyer could be making over $3,000,000.00 per year!  Even lawyers contracted by the IRS to investigate Microsoft are costing over >$1000 per hour:

Despite a court order to preserve documents, the IRS wiped the hard drive of an important IRS official, Mr. Samuel Maruca. Controversially, Mr. Maruca helped the IRS hire Quinn Emanuel, an outside law firm tasked with pursuing Microsoft. Hiring outsiders at over $1,000 an hour (!) angered Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, who wrote a letter to the IRS complaining about strange deal and the $2.2 million fee.

This is where this unbridled lawyer greed has led:

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, financial adviser David Kuenzi told the story of an American school teacher whose Swiss husband died of cancer. She evidently didn’t realize that she was obligated to disclose her deceased husband’s Swiss pension. That’s when things spiraled out of control for the widow.

“Despite having paid all of her U.S. taxes on time,” Kuenzi wrote, “she is advised by a California law firm to enter the IRS’s Off-Shore Voluntary Disclosure Program. She paid the firm a retainer fee of $124,000 to begin the OVD process and was told to expect penalties of up to $800,000.”

This poor widowed school teacher, lucky to be making $50,000 a year, paid probably 4 years of her after tax income, just as a retainer!  All on a Swiss pension of a couple of tens of thousands of dollars a year that had already been taxed in Switzerland.  And that doesn't even consider the obscene level of penalties that will be extracted from her by the holier than thou legal experts.

Aside from the question of what these parasites really contribute to society or the economy (answer zip, zero, nada), what special skills does this caste of parasites really have that makes them worth $3,000,000 a year?

Well the IRS tax code is 70,000 pages long.  It is contradictory, vague, open to misinterpretation, and constantly changing, and all of this is criminally deliberate.  But it is written by a criminal caste of people who have been trained to think a certain way, whose minds have been sanitized by certain thought patterns.  Sure, one has to know what is in the code, but a large proportion of the reference material is actually relevant to specific branches of IRS wealth extraction, so a tax parasite lawyer never has to have a complete understanding of the entire 70,000 pages in his head to be able to make obscene amounts of money.  I would actually say that the amount of brain power or knowledge required would be no more than a typical computer programmer making $100,000 (whose jobs are deliberately being stolen and given to H1b visa holders earning probably $50,000).  That's per year, not like a tax lawyer makes in a couple of weeks.

So what really makes the members of this legal parasite caste worth 30x or more as much as a decent computer programmer?  Here are some of my thoughts:

1.  Since getting a H1b visa in order to enter the civil service and work for the IRS would be extremely difficult, they have to be a US citizen or at least already have a green card.

2.  They have to have passed the BAR exam in at least one state to enter the elite cast of parasites that wield monopoly power over interpretation of the "laws" of our society.

3.  They need to have served at least a few years in the IRS, preferably as a high level legal council, and made many valuable future contacts.  This likely would entail spending these few years somewhere near the epicenter of foul corruption, Washington DC.

4.  They have to have sufficient statist mental hygeine.  There are several aspects to this:
4a.   Can they block empathy to the IRS's tax victims through things like self righteousness.
4b.   Or are they psychopaths who suffer from complete lack of empathy. 

5.  To gain entry into the highest levels of this elite parasite caste, they need to be loyal not to the US constitution or the American people,  but to a certain tribe.  
5a.  One can be born into this tribe like the upper echelons of the US government money departments, the FED, the treasury and the IRS.  Consider who runs them to understand:  Janet Yellen, Jack Lew, John Koskinen.  Or go back one generation:  Bernanke, Geitner, Schulman.
5b.  If you weren't born into the tribe, you have to have allowed yourself to be become blackmailable.  The best method of this is pedophilia, preferable some photographs.  Send them straight to Tel Aviv.