Great idea: Tax cheats write tax regulations

The IRS is apparently privatizing the writing of tax regulations so that the very people who create illegal tax shelters can design the structure of the regulations they will be subjected to:

The Internal Revenue Service is asking tax lawyers and accountants who create tax shelters and exploit loopholes to take the lead in writing some of its new tax rules.

The pilot project represents a further expansion of the increasingly common federal government practice of asking outsiders to do more of its work, prompting academics and other critics to complain that the government is going too far.

They worry that having private lawyers and accountants draft tax rules could allow them to subtly skew them in favor of their clients.

“It’s not the fox guarding the hen house; it’s the fox designing the hen house,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of political science at New York University, who studies the federal work force.

I can see all sorts of things that could work along these lines. Suppose, for example, we privatize the judiciary and allow convicts to appoint themselves to judgeships. Just think, we could probably substantially lower the cost of running the judicial system that way.