lots of rules is what has made this country great
That's just crazy. Extensive rule making only drains greatness, even in the effort to enforce the actually important rules. Even if every rule was justified (which is nonsense when your talking about the tons of rules that we have), it takes incredible amount of time, energy, and money just to figure out the rules, and then to comply with them. And having more and more things controlled by government rules, incentivices people to put more effort to manipulate the rules to their own advantage (often by adding costs to their actual or potential competitors).
When rules, laws, and legal and regulatory interpretations get as extensive as ours are, compliance becomes difficult, and effective enforcement of all the rules becomes impossible. Instead you get selective enforcement, empowering the enforcers, or you get no enforcement, or you begin to get whole areas of activity effectively shut down. |
