Rules

Megan McArdle and I tend to come at many issues from different perspectives, since she's writing from a well-established political position, and I'm writing as a reporter. But I think this post of hers on the accumulation of rules in the federal bureaucracy is thought-provoking. It's hard to roll back rules once they're in place, and it's an enormously daunting task to even consider going through the entirety of federal regulations to determine which of them ought to be eliminated in the first place. Instead, we discover that a rule is cumbersome when we bump up against it, and then the contingency passes, and the rule's troublesome nature fades from memory again. It's a huge problem. I don't know how it can be fixed, though.