Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Laws are designed by the government - if the executive branch cannot, by law, compete with TurboTax, then the legislative branch is free to alter the laws in whatever (constitutional) way benefits the society and explicitly delegate some agency the power (and duty!) to make TurboTax redundant.

View on HN

it'd be great if it worked this way, but it's already been captured at both a federal and at least 1 state level:

https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-...

https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...

yah, businesses making money via legitimately adding value is awesome; making it via rent seeking and regulatory capture sucks.

turbotax could still have a lucrative business by building on top of free filing with value added services, but no, they want government-protected profits. it's dishonorable.

and it's a symptom of money controlling politics. we need to figure out how to allow politicians to be productive and contributive without money being the measuring stick proxying power.

Yeah I agree. Congress is trying to pass a law to prohibit the IRS from doing free tax returns (competing with Turbotax) but theoretically congress could just repeal that law whenever they get around to finally letting the IRS just do the tax returns right? So all the law would do is prevent an executive order for the IRS to do that

Oh my, you don't know how laws get "designed." Congress ostensibly writes the laws, but they're now often allowing outside special interests and lawyers to pass along laws for introduction nearly verbatim. Furthermore, Intuit was caught lobbying to keep the tax submission process complicated and not free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com