It's a question of benefits vs. costs. Yeah, retailers could eliminate shoplifting if they really wanted to. But, to do so, they'd have to turn their stores int

It's a question of benefits vs. costs. Yeah, retailers could eliminate shoplifting if they really wanted to. But, to do so, they'd have to turn their stores into prisons, with full cavity searches at the exits. This is obviously bad for business, so most retailers accept a certain level of shoplifting and aggressively prosecute the shoplifters they do catch. The problem is that with government, there is no mechanism for assessing whether the costs of a regulation are outweighed by its benefits. What good does banning biscuits at company meetings do? Yes, you've saved 200 thousand odd pounds sterling, but what has it cost you? More importantly, what's the accumulated costs of all of these little regulations. Individually, they don't sound like much, but if you get enough of them, they really start to drag on productivity. What's worse, the impact of these regulations tends to be non-linear. Something as little as "no more free pop at all hands meetings" can lead to an exodus of talent if it happens to be the last straw, as it were. EDIT: Joel Spolsky had a very nice column on this, but I can't find it at the moment.