I've been thinking about how society chooses what the rules are, and I'm not very happy about it.

It seems laws and regulation often happen in two ways:

1. Because of some specific event that people suddenly care about. Similar to how people care a lot about plane crashes but not at all about all the poeple dying in traffic accidents.
2. Some specific group cares a lot about an issue, and while everyone else is against it, most don't care enough to know, or do, anything about it.

The first case leads to rules that are exaggerated and poorly designed since they're based on short-term reactions to some specific situation, while the law being created will apply to lots of different situations over a long period of time. The second case over time accumulates into "death by a thousand papercuts" as life gets continuously worse for "regular people", but only slowly.

There's a third case, where the majority agrees (for a long time) that something needs to be regulated and it eventually happens. And what I find interesting about this case is that it seems very rare for people to consider what the cost of the relevant regulation actually is - probably because no one has to directly pay it. When you go to a store and see a thing you like, you might very well change your mind when you see the price.

But when it comes to laws, people have no idea how much it's going to cost businesses to follow the law (which will lead to higher prices or lower quality), what it's going to cost society to administer and enforce the law (which will lead to higher taxes or worse services), or in which ways it's going to burden them in their regular life if they end up getting entangled in the bureaucratic mess (like stricter rules to reduce welfare-fraud will also cause people who deserve it to "accidentally" be denied). Even if it's calculated that the cost will be x million dollars to society, people can't understand something that abstract.

In general it seems the laws and rules of a democracy aren't being carefully designed in order to achieve the best outcome. Instead it's more like a drunk person stumbling haphazardly in some general direction. Over a long period of time, the people will get some notable portion of the rules that they want, but it will always be a long and inefficient process where a significant portion of the current rules will always be detrimental.