I think there&#x27;s a lot of truth to what you&#x27;re saying, but it&#x27;s more complex than that.<p>When considering legislation and regulation, we willingly juggle a lot of cognitive dissonance. We seem to divide plan into (at least) its implementation and its intended effect, and consider each of those separately.<p>So I&#x27;m endlessly having conversations with friends of a different political stripe (which is easy, since <i>everyone</i> is of a different political stripe than me) that go something like: (note I&#x27;m not trying to trigger the implied political debate, this is for illustration only)<p><i>Friend</i>: Financial system bailouts and systemic risks of &quot;too big to fail&quot; are terrible, and so we can&#x27;t touch the Dodd-Frank legislation.<p><i>Me</i>: I know that supporters of Dodd-Frank promised that it would put an end to TBTF. But the bill doesn&#x27;t actually contain anything that does that. And in fact, since the industry has further consolidated since the bill was passed, it shows that whatever the intent, it isn&#x27;t able to do its job successfully. If it can&#x27;t do what you want it to do, why should we keep it?<p><i>Friend</i>: But the banks are out of control, and we need to do something to prevent another collapse. We can&#x27;t remove any regulation on them!<p>Maybe this is just the normal voter ignorance effect, but it seems that we assume people are making decisions based on <i>actual</i> understanding, but they&#x27;re really just using oversimplified proxies instead, <i>even when the inaccuracy of their proxy is pointed out to them</i>. So a law that purports to fix X (whether X is healthcare or immigration or whatever) is a necessity, regardless of what the actual evidence, whether empirical or from reading the bill, tells us.<p>TL;DR: passing a law is intended to make us feel like we&#x27;re doing the right thing, not necessarily to actually do it.