What people arguing against accretion of regulations tend to miss is that this accretion (as currently experienced in the US at least) goes hand-in-hand with accumulation of capital and consolidation of industries. The large corporations can afford to comply with complex regulations. For them, maintaining complex regulatory regimes (through legalized bribery and regulatory capture) is part of the defensive fortifications that maintain their monopoly/oligopoly positions. As an optimist, I believe we can reform the system (e.g., through antitrust enforcement, which the FTC under Ms. Khan is doing more of than in recent decades), rather than burn it down.

Regulations go hand-in-hand with creating a safe and functioning civilization.

Just look at the crypto market and imagine if we all had to use those zany tokens to do things. We couldn't get anything done.

That used to exist back in the 1800's.

Our financial systems are very stable and far more resilient than we recognize. We take that for granted.

When is the last time depositors arbitrarily lost a pile of cash while not investing in risky things?

That's a 'new financial innovation' largely enabled by laws and oversight etc. that your great-great grandparents didn't have the luxury of having.

I applaud your optimism, but don't let optimism cloud realism. There's comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses.

> comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses

This is historically untrue. When complex societies civil war, they tend to fall apart. (Wars of unification being an exception.) Their citizens’ living conditions permanently fell, often for generations, until an outside power subsumed them.

This trend looks to be strengthening as time goes on, probably on account of increasing species-wide firepower and mobility. Instead, peaceful (if politically violent) “revolutions” reboot the society from time to time. One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system.

"One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system."

A better argument would be the case that American involvement in WWII resulted in a larger restructuring of American lives.

Women entering the workforce.

The U.S. military fighting racial segregation.

The resultant boomer generation and the rise of labor until 1980.

Lowered income inequality.

The GI bill providing affordable higher-ed to a broad swatch of the populace.

Also a dramatic reorganization of global trade towards open markets.

I don't think war is necessary (and looking at things like the "war on terror" that spawned a lot of rules, it might even do the opposite).

Societies can do "de-sprawling" of rules, but it isn't a frequent thing (the German civil code is kind of a reduction of lots of several codes into one, for example).

There is probably also an element of aging societies becoming more risk averse, hence more rules and regulations.

The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).

Fair enough. WW1 spawned things like DORA in the UK, for example.

Edit: And WW2 saw another massive increase of the "state", so not sure war does generally shrink administrative systems.

If you lose the war decisively, you have a chance to rebuild the state from scratch, including the legal system.

As a winner, though, you face the task of trying to shrink an administrative system that just won a war.

Obvious examples are Germany and Japan after WW2.

Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848.

They had a very small-scale civil war which made them rethink their political structure.

Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until today.

Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme example.

They were post-WW2. The German Miracle in particular came about when Germany went full free market as a way to recover from the economy being burned to the ground. This boom lasted until 1970 when the socialists were voted into power, and on came the taxes and hamstringing. The Japanese economy immediately after WW2 was run by American leftist academics, who refused to allow big business to operate. The economy flatlined. Until that was rescinded, and the Japanese free market economic boom began and ran up into the 80s.

That sounds very much like a conveniently right-wing potted history. I'd be willing to bet the truth is rather more subtle*. Either way, they were both examples of economies that only got off the ground because of massive government spending.

(*) a quick read of a wikipedia article about the Japanese economic miracle - which undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda - certainly confirms this. At best relaxing anti-monopoly laws was an example of legislation reform that helped further boost the already impressive recovery that had occurred during the 50s.

Um, where did Germany get "massive government spending"? If you say "the Marshall Plan", look up the MP on wikipedia. Germany did get MP money, but far less than Britain and France did. The latter two did not have a "British Miracle" or "French Miracle".

I didn't claim the spending was the prime cause of any "miracle", but it's fairly certain it wouldn't have happened without it. France and the UK did have impressive recoveries too, that would have been impossible without the MP etc.

FWIW I would actually expect the fact that because the priority at the time was economic recovery before everything else, red tape wasn't allowed to get in the way to the degree it often seems to once prosperity had been restored. I'd even say that's probably a reasonable trade off, though it certainly doesn't justify governments letting growing businesses get away with whatever they feel like. Nobody likes bureaucracy or red tape, but almost always it's what we end up with as a result of repeated cases of corporate behaviour that's widely agreed to be unacceptable.

> undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda

Leftists always mis-attribute the causes of prosperity. The wikipedia article cites causes that are commonplace in other countries that had no miracle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle

Leftist economies have never experienced an economic miracle in any country.

East Germany, for example (compared with West Germany).

Nobody here is arguing a fully socialist command-and-control economy is a better choice.

But you haven't made any sort of case that the German or Japanese "miracles" were largely due to raw unrestrained capitalism. There are way too many factors that made those particular countries special cases at the time to pinpoint all the primary causes, let alone tease out various secondary factors some of which probably tempered rather than accelerated growth.

German ordoliberalism and the social market economy are certainly not full free market, i.e., Germany never went full free market after WW2 and there also would have been no political support for such a move (from the left or right). The boom then ended in the 2nd half of the 1960s.

A country does not have to be "full" free market to enjoy the benefits of the free market. The more free market it is, the better the results. It's one of the beauties of the free market.

German industry was very interconnected with limited domestic competition in those days - a free market it was not by a long shot.

Edit: It's fine to make broad claims about free market and growth, but please provide some citations to back up sweeping statements (and also to allow to go deeper into definitions).

Do I really need citations for free market growth? Every country that tries it gets good results - the more free market, the better.

Communist economies always wind up facing famine.

Communist China, for example, switched from a communist economy to a free market one. Look at the results. Korea split in two, one communist, one free market. Which one prospered? East vs West Germany, same story.

The US tried central economic planning for gasoline in the 1970's (repealed by Reagan as his first EO). Disaster. The US tried central economic planning for airline routes, fares, and schedules up until Reagan ended that. The result was a huge increase in efficiency and low fares.

Of course you do! Statements like "The more free market it is, the better the results" are not just about things at the ends of the spectrum, so that needs proper backing not handwaving about communist vs. capitalist economies. For example, is Norway more free market than Iceland? What are the criteria?

The point is that any such bureaucracy is recently formed and not a legacy of pre-1945 statutes.

Perhaps but war was posited of a method of "clearing the books" and allowing significant reform. If that were true you'd expect such societies to be less weighed down by bureaucracy than others that had no such opportunity.

Clearing of books has no bearing whatsover on subsequent re-writing of them.

However if the present legislative burden is excessively oppressive, a war, revolution, or reconstitution might address same.

Your argument is a non sequitur.

Germany and Japan have had reputations as being somewhat bureaucractic for decades though, which says to me war had no lasting impact, if any at all. I.e. a very expensive way to achieve nothing.

Notionally the "wars" on drugs and terror are more akin to the Islamic principle of jihad, in the sense of a struggle, rather than of military domination, occupation, and conquest.

In the case of World War II, numerous governments were created from whole cloth following the war, amongst conquored territories, in newly-created states, and even amongst some of the winners.

Notably, Japan had a constitution imposed on it by the United States, which largely exists to the present day. Some traditional institutions were preserved (e.g., the emperor), but in almost entirely symbolic form. Germany likewise was reconstituted under a new government, as was Italy. Even France saw a new government formed (the Fifth Republic) in 1958. The states of the Eastern bloc were reconstituted under Communist rule as Soviet satellites. India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and several Arabic states received independence. The state of Israel was formed. Much of Africa decolonised in the 1950s and 1960s.

There was of course some continuity through all of this, but in large part, new governments emerged and old laws were often voided.

But through all of that the German civil code after WW2 still looked quite similar to the one pre-WW1, e.g, rules on how people transact or private property had huge continuity.

Isn't the question not that laws etc. change but if there is true reduction of the total?

Huh?

I started a company for a small project on Tuesday. It took me 30 minutes and I never left my chair.

Get some employees, have some of them turn out to be pain in the ass, then find out how annoying west coast labor laws are.

Hire some employees, spread them across multiple states, find out the complexities of employment law in multiple states.

Start up a health plan, same thing.

There a million examples, none of them are bad by themselves, but every aspect of a multi employee business has rules and regulations that if you run afoul of, there are consequences. No one gives you a manual of these, you find them out along the way and it costs you money and time.

I was an exec at a small company in a union building in Manhattan. I’m familiar with annoyances.

That’s life. It’s full of annoyances. Our forebearers had a lot more.

Maybe the OP hadn't in mind the actual process of incorporating a company per se, but the process of "starting" a company as in getting it off the ground in terms of money coming in/revenues. And, imo, it's more difficult now to do that compared to 10, 20 years ago, and not only because of increased competition.

There are more opportunities for 'regular folks' to do something on a 'grand scale' than at any time in history, but not everyone can do it.

Paradoxically, starting your own business in the 'old time' way, i.e. plumbing or roofing contractors ... it's like guaranteed work for great income. Plumbers are the new Dentists.

That said, there are areas in which regulatory issues are obviously a problem.

This talk of 'war' is hyperbolic.