> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
I will add this: the number of ways in which humans can harm one another is immeasurable, and every law comes with an associated cost. At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions. But bad laws can also dampen legitimate economic activity, making social problems worse.
As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either.
The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions.
> At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions.
Don't forget compliance costs. Those are some of the largest costs and they're largely hidden because they don't go into the government budget. You pass a law to prevent a million dollars in total harm and then a hundred thousand companies each spend $100 to comply with it, what did you get and what did you pay?
Compliance costs also have a specific type of cost because of their asymmetry. It's like adding a fixed amount of weight to a boat. If you add 1000 pounds of regulatory costs to a 200,000 ton container ship, it doesn't even notice. If you add the same amount of weight to a kayak, it sinks. But if you keep adding costs until you sink all the small boats, and then sink all the medium boats, you're not just failing to solve all the problems caused by market consolidation, you're actively making them worse.
Oh sure, if we can somehow get functional anti-trust, campaign finance reform, labor protections, and progressive taxation, then we probably wouldn't need nearly as many of these protective laws.
However, I don't see that happening anytime soon so the numerous laws are the best option we have.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.