Socialism fails again. Goalposts being moved as we speak.

[Husar]

I take the stance that governmental decisions should be resolved at the lowest possible level. While I don't like most of the socialist approaches, I am very much in favor of communities making decisions for themselves where possible, with a 'higher' level of government superseding only so as to stand as arbiter for the boundaries of each community (on a 'my rights stop at your nose" basis mostly) OR where the more local community is demonstrably inappropriate for making decisions in that context (the Seminole County Florida Board of Commissioners and County Manager would not be the right level for conducting foreign policy for the USA). I acknowledge that some measure of communalism/socialism WILL factor into decisions at the community level.

I also concur that some degree of regulation is required for capitalism to function effectively. Though Smith's 'invisible hand' should still be the prime mover, I do acknowledge that the <1% of truly unethical bastards can do horrific economic damage to others (especially in the elctronic era) absent some form of regulation. While I prefer that regulation be kept to the absolute minimum to discourage and police fraud and to mandate certain minimums for occupational and public safety, some degree of regulation is a must.

But isn't that more or less how we ended up where we are now?
I'd assume most societies started out with relatively simple laws but due to the world becoming more complex in general and people using and abusing loopholes left and right, the laws had to become more complex as well. Not that I studied the history of law, it just seems like a natural development to me. Simplifying certain things would likely create a lot of loopholes and require more complexity again to fix them. Of course on the other hand, the complexity can at some point be used again to create loopholes in the first place...

As for decisions at a lower level, you get the problem of competition, in the extreme example, a corporation such as Monsanto could starve a community if it refuses to relax certain environmental protection standards and so on. Preventing such shenanigans would then again require a sufficiently powerful government (i.e. one that controls a market large enough that it would hurt a corporation to ignore the market) to forbid such shenanigans, which also makes legislation more complex and so on.

In the end I would argue that current laws are still too lax or at least not sufficiently enforced given that there are several corporations that only keep a few small competitors around so they can claim not to have a monopoly while they do in fact have a quasi-monopoly. My favourite example: Intel. The monopoly is already reflected in pricing and other policies, they can pretty much shape the market to their liking because AMD could not really compete in recent years. And when AMD could, they bribed retailers, which was proven in Germany, to not sell their products and thus denied AMD income that might have helped AMD to stay on top of their game. The punishment they received for that was relatively laughable. Which leads me to believe that currently the government is not controlling businesses in a sufficient way, prices that are 20-30% above what they would be on a truly competitive market are not in the interest of the customer and should not be in the interest of the government because they effectively increase wealth inequality, hinder progress, etc.

So I guess in some ways I agree with you that laxer rules would be desirable, I would argue however that the complexity of the modern world and human greed make more complex laws on higher levels of government a natural development.