I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but it's more complex than that. When considering legislation and regulation, we willingly juggle a lot o

I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but it's more complex than that. 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. So I'm endlessly having conversations with friends of a different political stripe (which is easy, since everyone is of a different political stripe than me) that go something like: (note I'm not trying to trigger the implied political debate, this is for illustration only) Friend: Financial system bailouts and systemic risks of "too big to fail" are terrible, and so we can't touch the Dodd-Frank legislation. Me: I know that supporters of Dodd-Frank promised that it would put an end to TBTF. But the bill doesn'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't able to do its job successfully. If it can't do what you want it to do, why should we keep it? Friend: But the banks are out of control, and we need to do something to prevent another collapse. We can't remove any regulation on them! Maybe this is just the normal voter ignorance effect, but it seems that we assume people are making decisions based on actual understanding, but they're really just using oversimplified proxies instead, even when the inaccuracy of their proxy is pointed out to them. 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. TL;DR: passing a law is intended to make us feel like we're doing the right thing, not necessarily to actually do it.