It's easy to find what arguments people gave for instituting a rule.
That is often different from the real reason it was enacted or is kept around.
There is always a nice sounding argument for even the most blatantly unfair rule. Normally, due to Motivated Reasoning, the people benefitting from them even honestly believes the arguments!
As I noted in another reply below, I think it's fine to make the argument that the 2+ parking place rule comes from zoning policies that are ultimately racist, and that if you can show that this is really the sole origin of the rule, you've cleared "the fence" and can start to meangingully propose alternatives.
But such a historically-aware analysis is a far cry from "too much government regulation ... regulatory capture ... wah!"
There is a bias that the present and recent history is how things are and should be and that any changes require superior proof than the initial experiment in passing the legislation.
I think the USA could benefit from "more government", but even saying that is woefully ambiguous. What does "less government" or "more government" even mean? Less laws? More government workers? Too much spending?
Regulatory capture is indeed a problem, but it's not unique to the USA and there's no point pretending that it's unsolvable.
Reality is far, far more complex and interesting than that!
and you're just declaring those based on feelings? or something you saw on fox news?
Improvising law and doing so imperfectly seems like a textbook recipe for "stupid law". That particular stupid law was worth complaining about "the law being an ass" (because it obviously was) and "the perfect example of government inflexibility" (local gov goes forward with putting down blameless horses based on an obscure law enacted 80 years ago in response to a situation that is nowhere near prevalent nor relevant today)
Maybe I'm missing something obvious but in light of this I'm curious how that specific example helps your argument?
The right thing to do do in the horse case would have been to repeal the law, since for sure, it no longer really applied. By contrast, the call from the public was "this is just another example of excessive government regulation", which is an entirely different claim.
But do you really want to argue for "oh, no problem, the police/courts can just ignore that statute because its clear to everyone that the original conditions that led to it no longer apply?" Really?
we allow people to park on the street overnight. It's very simple to just not allow that
But notice how utterly different your argument is to the OP, who talked about excessive government regulation, regulatory capture and so on.
(and yes, one can make a case that codification of racism in law statutes is a kind of regulatory capture, but it's really not what most people mean when they use that term)
If you go case by case through all the nonsensical things in the american legal system, you'll find most of the time that the reason they were put in place originally was racism. Zoning is a prime example.
However, racism doesn't require 2+ parking spaces, just single family dwellings that cost more than poor people can afford.
https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-the...
https://evonomics.com/amazing-north-african-scholar-beat-ada...
Ronald Reagan quoting Ibn Khaldun on his views on tax rates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
"Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."
What you've written is an all-too typical complaint of people who don't bother to understand the history of our existing legal, political and social structures. It's easy to hand wave and vent about "regulatory capture" (I do it all the time).
But go and dig down and find out why that 2+ parking space rule exists. You will find a massively more complex, and much more pro-public, pro-people, pro-progress agenda in play than anything you just wrote suggests.
I remember an example of this sort of thing that I came across in eastern WA about 20+ years ago. A small town there was facing protests because it was about to put down ("execute") several wild horses that were hanging about the town. The law was very clear about what had to be done, but the public, both in town and elsewhere in the state were aghast. The horses were healthy, beautiful and there seemed to be no good justification for killing the as the law required. People complained about the law being an ass (no pun intended) and said that this was the perfect example of government inflexibility and law making by people with selfish interests.
But all it took was a little history detour to go back and find out why the law(s) in question had come into being. It had indeed been the case that in the not too distant past (by global standards, not necessarily those of the western US), wild horses had indeed been a problem in town, and that the towns people had tried several approaches to dealing with and/or fixing the problems. None of them had been very successful, and some 80 years earlier, the town had reluctantly adopted a law where an unowned horse, if not claimed by anyone within a reasonable period of notice, must be put down.
This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so imperfectly. Improving this particular law, and others like it (such as your 2+ parking space case) isn't going to happen by assuming that the existing legal framework exists because of malintent. It's going to happen by carefully understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better.