You either save the billions in taxes or cannot scale further because now you can't afford to compete with those that do.

Also things sure do look different when you are at the helm. If you decide your company should pay more in taxes the board will probably vote you out on your ass.

> if breaking the spirit of the law is fine, shouldn't breaking the letter of the law be fine as well?

There's no law against breaking the spirit of the law. Breaking the spirit of the law will only get you tried in the court of public opinion. Breaking the letter will also go to a court of justice.

One should read up on the judiciary system in their specific state before they start breaking the spirit of the law.

In some states the judges are quasi-politicians with an implied mandate to rule how they think the people want them to rule. In others the judiciary is a system for evaluating the law and they see they consider it their mandate to enforce the law exactly as written, especially when it gives the legislature and the public the middle finger because that's the incentive for those groups to write and demand good law.

The thing about capitalism is that companies that don’t do everything in their power to increase profit are at a disadvantage against those who do. Profit is the ability to invest more in R&D, attract more investors, scale faster, advertise more. Unless your consumers care enough to only support you if you pay taxes, or you can get substantially more productive employees by paying taxes, or some other advantage in the marketplace by paying taxes, paying taxes when your competition does not is an albatross around your neck. And if your morality creates enough albatrosses around your neck your company will either fold or be eternally small as your competitors without such restrictions have higher efficiency. So it’s a no-brainer in that any company that gets to the scale where spending millions on lawyers is appropriate is already of this mindset.

This is why laws need to be crafted to not give companies the benefit of the doubt when it comes to acting in the best interest of society. Less because it is impossible for a company to be moral in a vacuum, but because if being immoral is allowed and advantageous inevitably the immoral company will out compete the moral one. (Of course it can be hard to agree on what moral is. Some say that taxes are immoral after all.)