I used to think the same way, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea now.<p>Problem is that it's much easier to ignore bad rules than it is to fix them.  You're assuming that if everyone had to abide by the bad rules, they'd get fixed.  I'm not sure that's the case - the examples I gave indicate that when you force employees to abide by bad rules, they just start acting badly.<p>When I was younger, I used to find it very frustrating that the rules said one thing but the way everyone acted was something else.  We even have a word for that: "hypocrisy".  But as I've gotten older and occasionally even been responsible for creating some of those rules, I've started realizing that the rules are an abstraction.  They're there to set expectations.  They aren't followed exactly because they <i>can't</i> be followed exactly, and if you try you end up with absurdities like confiscated toothpaste.  I'm not so certain that fixing the laws will work, both because it's difficult and because it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.