It's really not as simple as that.

Yes, businesses (and people) are 100% always going to pay only what they legally have to. That's taxes for you - nobody wants to "tip" the government. Nor should they.

Things get sticky once you realize that tax "loopholes" are double edged swords. One edge is the "good" activity you are trying to encourage from the market/economy, and the other is how it can be abused.

Almost every benefit has abuse potential.

I'm not a tax lawyer, so I'm assuming I'm missing details and specifics here, but here are some very rough examples to help explain what I mean:

Law / Benefit: Farms in certain places are exempt from property tax. Someone out there decided that we don't have enough farms or that farm costs are too high or whatever and we should give those hard working folks a damn break. Cool. Farms don't have property taxes, this should encourage more farms and farm growth.

Abuse: Rich guy has a 25 million dollar mansion. His tax bill (call it 2%) is 500k. Booo. Taxes. Rich guy puts 12 bee hives on the outskirts of his property line for a few thousand bucks and hires a full time beekeeper for $35k per year. Savings: $465,000. He even sells the honey and makes some money on it, which further proves he's a "real farm".

This is just one of MANY examples of how the rich will use a totally 'valid' law to their advantage by simply doing whatever is necessary to legally qualify. And the folks who wrote the law don't want to just eliminate it because they still believe the benefit is something that will stimulate positive behavior. So you need to balance tightening the law without discouraging the positive behavior. It's a fine line. Not impossible, but the law moves slowly, lobbying makes it even slower (or stalls it entirely), and the rich move very quickly.

Closing tax loopholes is like a game of whack-a-mole. Except the law is swinging through molasses and the rich is avoid it in high powered sports cars.