Regulations

One of the things that really does need to be looked at is how many regulations we have vs how many we need.

Having dealt with them my whole life, it is clear that they tend to get worse over time.

There is a simple reason for this, human ingenuity.

Once you create a regulation that prohibits or punishes profitable behavior, the people who would profit study it to determine how to avoid it.  Let take the war on drugs.

Illegal drugs are tremendously profitable and many of them are also quite illegal.  Of course some just try not to get caught, or if caught have less on them then any thresholds established for greater punishment.

A more ingenious group has another approach, creating new drugs not covered by the existing regulations.  This allows them to sell drugs with similar or better effects but no risk until the regulations are expanded to cover the new drugs.

You can see how this works in things like sports where every year rules committees have to tweak rules for games that haven't generally changed except that certain rules get exploited or clarifications are required because of flaws that were discovered.

That's the problem with regulations, the people who write them are people.

Take things like traffic rules.  I for various reasons often drive late at night.  At some intersections there are restrictions like no turn on red which make sense when the street is busy but are silly when no other cars are anywhere near.  Now at many of these intersections the risk of an accident is non-existent at certain times, but the people who make these rules don't care, or don't care enough to review all the intersections and adjust the signs.  It could also get expensive since whatever times they post is likely to be wrong, one way or the other.

There is though a clear tendency to continue to revise regulations clarifying the regulations already issued.  Having been through a number of reform attempts, I know that the pro and anti regulation forces can't agree so we generally are left with a worse situation than we had before.

Of course simple saying things like eliminate two regulations for every new one issued only results in longer regulations.

People are clever that way.