One could argue that it's made "natural and easy" by making Lisp itself much more difficult to write. So, in other languages, the macro authors pay the tax, but their users do not. In Lisp, everyone pays the tax. This is, perhaps, why writing macros is far more common in Lisp than in other languages with them - if you pay the tax either way, you might as well fully utilize what it buys you. Whereas in another language, you weigh the benefit that a macro will give you, against the tax you will pay if and only if you write a macro.