Public shame and malice towards individuals who violate expected norms is actually a fairly good deterrent toward would-be bad actors. I'm sure there are many millions of instances per day where people decide not to do untoward things because they care about their reputations.

But on the flip side, you are also correct. It's important that public attention also be directed towards the systems that incentivize and enable bad behavior, and the people who create those systems. Patching laws, shaping incentives, and empowering a distributed system of judges and courts to handle violations is ultimately much cleaner, fairer, predictable, wide-reaching, and (therefore) more effective than disorganized mob-led shame campaigns.

Unfortunately, several things work against this:

1. It requires much more time, education, intelligence, and emotional self-control to care about system design over simply shaming others. These four things aren't abundantly common in most populaces.

2. Lawmakers and politicians have their own incentives to redirect public attention away from themselves. And they can take advantage of #1 to do this, which is basically what demagoguery is.

3. Similarly, media companies have their own incentive, which is to increase clicks and shares and subscribers. And appealing to base emotions with strong headlines works 100x better than discussing complex laws and systems. Research shows that the #1 emotion that leads to sharing online is outrage.

"If folks are mad about actions that are legal, it makes zero sense to be mad at the actor."

There are people with mindset "I will try to be an overall decent human being and maintain some awareness and empathy of others", and there are the "I will be as much of a selfish asshole as the legal system allows me to, and wreak untold damage in the endless game of whack-a-mole".

I think in fact more of us should be gunning after the second kind :). To paraphrase you, It makes zero sense for me to be OK with fundamentally anti-social, anti-humanity humanoids.

Dunno muchabout the US tax code but in the french tax code when there is a tax break there are practical conditions and an information intention / context by the legislative assembly in the law project. If french deputies create a tax break to incentivize research and you use it to get a tax break given investment in infrastructure not at all linked to any research, even if you match the practical conditions it's considered an abuse/diverting of the law and the french tax administration can completely cancel your tax break and you'll have to sue them in our administrative justice branch to change their decision.

You're claiming that legality is the necessary & sufficient condition for. Legal != Good, Right, Just, Moral, etc.

Many things are illegal, but still you'd have to be an immoral, evil asshole to do.

For these companies, it's totally worth doing illegal tax shit. Even if they are forced to pay, they pay it years down the line, so the current cost of capital starts to come into play.

This is something we all do

pitchforks down, its the reporter and the non technical accountants that are wrong and both groups should be replaced

I'd guess nearly every citizen tries to pay the least amount in taxes they possibly can.

The NYT article strikes me as disguised envy: "they make more money than us, so let's demonize them for doing something we all do: minimizing our tax burden."