You know why the EU overregulates? Because EU countries individually overregulate. And you know why that is? Because European people ask for new regulation every single time something goes wrong or might go wrong in the future or is a little bit unfair in some rare cases.

In the UK, we now have a debate about regulating portion sizes of ready meals, because some people are overweight. If you have voters and politicians who will even start to think about regulating this sort of thing, you're bound to end up with massive overregulation.

Sometimes the choice we have is between 28 different ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary laws or just one ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary law.

Your Unix metaphor is flawed. Countries are not special purpose tools. They don't do different things. They all do largely the same things in slightly different ways. So each country on its own already comes with all the issues that we criticise in monolythic software.