The existence of lobbying is in itself not interesting. Of course it is in their interest to protect their business, and it's reasonable for any company in a fr

The existence of lobbying is in itself not interesting. Of course it is in their interest to protect their business, and it's reasonable for any company in a free market to oppose the government undermining or destroying their business. The problem is that government has to suck up that cost and deal with it. The larger issue, and the thing that keeps us from having our taxes done for us, is that there is a strong feeling in the conservative and libertarian movements that taxes SHOULD be painful, and that exposing taxpayers to the complexities and annoyances of filing taxes is a necessity to make people want to reduce the pain associated with taxes, and keep their legislators in check. That is, any legislator who chooses to vote for an increase in taxes or an increase in the complexity of taxes should be voted out of office and replaced with someone who will do the opposite. In practice, this has failed miserably. There is absolutely no accountability associated with this, and legislators know that, and they have no interest in actually simplifying or otherwise reducing the burden of filing taxes. It's time to just give up and put "taxation is theft" to bed because people only care about this one month a year, and by the time elections come around we've forgotten it completely. It's tempting to say -- "how can we make it MORE painful", like, let's move tax day to November 1st, so that you go to the polls cursing your senator, but we know that this won't work.