I think a lot of it is not by design. Writing laws is hard, especially tax laws. Companies have incredible resources to find loopholes they can use. If they get

I think a lot of it is not by design. Writing laws is hard, especially tax laws. Companies have incredible resources to find loopholes they can use. If they get patched they'll just find another one. The problem is that you'd prefer easy laws that anyone can follow, but those will always have loopholes. The more provisions you add to close loopholes, the harder it'll be for small companies and individuals to remain compliant. I don't think any of us here could come up with a tax code that cannot be exploited. And of course large companies will exploit any loophole, all of us do when filing our taxes. Maybe the problem is the existence of such powerful companies. Once you have them, it's very hard for politicians to stay on top of them. To be clear, I'm not saying that there's no corruption or politicians favoring large companies. But most loopholes used by companies tend to stem from good intentions. It's like in IT security, there are backdoors but most bugs still have a benign origin.