It’s always some particular thing, but the pattern is clear. Government lacks the agility to correct its own mistakes, and they get carved in stone and last for years or decades before the mistakes are corrected.

Government is like a child who places his hand on the stove, and then must get consensus among every neuron in his brain before removing the hand. Someone then says “government tends to burn its hands on the stove” and someone else says “yes but only because of how stupidly the reflex was handled”.

In reality, a child who puts his hand on the stove benefits from the decentralized nervous system. The decision to whip the hand back off the stove is made at the spine, before the brain is aware.

Excessive government regulation mandates not only constraints and goals, but methods of implementation. And again, and again, and again, our society ends up with third degree burns as a result of government ordering the hand onto the stove, then lacking the efficiency to bring it back off again.

Generally speaking, government regulation has the property of producing problems like this one: it slices the world into categories, and those get set as rigid law.

But real world success comes from real time modification of categories, the merging and splitting of categories into whatever’s most useful. To kitchen designer, a cabinet is either a wall or a base cabinet. To a gunfighter, a cabinet is either solid cover or insufficient. To a cat, a cabinet is either rough enough to hook his claws into and climb, or not. To a kid, a cabinet is either a good place to hide during hide-and-seek, or not.

Categories need to be variable based on the goals at hand.

This thing with the truck design forced to fit a local maximum of value within the constraints created by those categories, is yet another example of the same thing happening.

In simpler terms, people need to be free to make decisions in order to produce value and things that work well. Excessive government regulation prevents those choices or makes their context artificial. The result can be absurdity at best, and utter failure and ruin at worst.

So perhaps the idea that government regulation will go as expected is what’s wrong.

Perhaps when new regulation is considered, one should try to imagine ways it could go wrong, if implemented by fallible people in chaotic organizations.