Transcript
You want less bureaucracy? Stop asking for more rules.
I know. That sounds too simple. Maybe even provocative. But here is the thing — it is exactly what we keep doing, and then we wonder why nothing gets better. We complain about drowning in regulations, and in the very same breath, we demand new ones. Politicians promise to cut red tape, and their plan to do it is — you guessed it — another law. Another set of guidelines. Another framework. We are literally trying to legislate our way out of legislation. And it does not work. It has never worked. It will never work.
Today, I want to talk about why that is — and what we should be doing instead.
The Paradox
Let me paint the picture. In Germany right now, bureaucracy is one of the top frustrations across the board — businesses, individuals, public institutions. And politicians have heard the message. So what is their answer? New legislation designed to reduce bureaucracy. Think about that for a second. A new law to fix the problem of too many laws. If you wrote that into a novel, your editor would tell you it is too on the nose. But that is where we are.
And Germany is not alone in this. Across Europe, across the United States, across every regulated market in the world, the pattern is the same. We respond to complexity with more complexity. We respond to confusion with more documentation. We respond to overregulation with — regulation about how to regulate.
Let me be absolutely clear: I am not an anarchist. Every functioning society needs some level of bureaucracy. Rules create structure. They protect people. They establish boundaries that allow cooperation at scale. Without any rules, you get chaos. No one serious is arguing for zero regulation.
But here is what no one seems willing to say out loud: there is also a point where rules stop serving us and we start serving them. And we passed that point a long time ago.
The Spiral
Here is how the spiral works. A problem appears. Someone says, we need a rule for that. So a rule gets created. Time passes. Circumstances change. The rule no longer fits perfectly. But instead of going back and understanding what the original rule actually says, instead of interpreting it in the context of the new situation, we skip that step entirely. We say, this rule is outdated, we need a new one. So a new rule gets created. Now we have two rules covering roughly the same territory. And because two overlapping rules create ambiguity, someone eventually says, we need a clarification. Which becomes rule number three.
Do you see the pattern? We never subtract. We only add. And with every addition, the system gets heavier, more tangled, harder to navigate. The more complicated things become, the less people actually read the rules. The less they read, the less they understand. The less they understand, the more confused they get. And what do confused people ask for? More clarity. Which means — more rules. And the spiral continues.
I wrote about this seven years ago in a blog post, and every word still applies today. Maybe even more so. Back then, I said there is a great desire for regulations, because they are convenient. They take the thinking out of it. You do not have to engage with the substance of a situation. You just check the boxes and make sure you comply. And that is the trap. Compliance becomes a substitute for judgment. Rule-following becomes a substitute for thinking. We have created entire industries around compliance — not around understanding, not around good judgment, but around making sure every box is ticked and every form is signed.
The Real-World Evidence
I used a simple example back then, and it still holds up. Nowadays, people would rather put up a no-parking sign than leave it up to individuals to think for themselves — is it sensible to park on the sidewalk here, or would it be better to use the parking lot ten meters away? The sign removes the need for thought. And we have become addicted to that comfort. We would rather be told what to do than figure it out ourselves.
On the road to overregulation, common sense is the first casualty.
But let me give you a more current example, because this is not just abstract theory. It is happening in schools, in businesses, in every area of daily life.
A school near me decided to go more digital. Good idea in principle. They purchased an online tool for managing lessons and communication. Now, because of data privacy regulations, they had to send every parent a three-page letter — three pages — about data privacy and legal implications. Parents were asked to give their consent. And the letter made very clear: this consent is fully voluntary.
So I read those three pages. I was not convinced this particular tool was a good idea. And since consent was voluntary, I did not give mine. Fair enough, right?
Wrong. Because shortly after, the school declared the tool mandatory. It became the only way to report a child's absence in case of illness. But since I had not consented, I had no access. So now I am in a situation where a tool that requires voluntary consent has been made compulsory, and because I exercised my right not to consent, I cannot fulfill a mandatory obligation.
When I raised this with the school, they acknowledged it was a contradiction. Their exact words were: we know it is a contradiction, but we do not quite know how to solve it.
That is bureaucracy in its purest form. A system that creates a problem it cannot solve, built on rules that contradict each other, administered by people who recognize the absurdity but feel powerless to fix it. And the instinct — the very first instinct — will be to create another rule to address this specific contradiction. Adding weight to an already sinking ship.
The Reading Problem
I spent years working as a compliance officer. My job was to read laws and regulations in detail and make sure organizations operated within them. And I can tell you from direct experience: most people do not read the rules they are supposed to follow. They do not read them in full, they do not read them carefully, and they certainly do not read them with an eye for edge cases.
When people are used to the regular cases — the straightforward, obvious scenarios — they tend to ignore edge cases entirely, or they pretend those edge cases do not exist. And when confronted with an edge case, with a situation that does not fit neatly into the standard interpretation, they do not go back and study the text. They call for new rules. Clearer rules, they say. But what they actually mean by clearer is: tell me exactly what to do so I do not have to think about it myself.
That is a fundamental problem. Because if people are not reading and understanding the rules we already have, what makes anyone believe they will read and understand new ones? New rules do not solve a reading problem. New rules do not solve a thinking problem. They just add more pages that will not get read either. And here is the irony — the people demanding clearer rules are often the same people who did not read the original ones.
Take data privacy as a prime example. The GDPR has been in effect for years. And most organizations still have no clear understanding of what it actually requires. So what do they do? They over-document. They make people sign forms that nobody reads, for purposes nobody fully understands, covering scenarios nobody has thought through. The approach is: more paper means more protection. Except it does not. It just means more paper.
And the consequences are real. Every regulation comes with penalties. The GDPR carries significant fines. The EU Cyber Resilience Act, the EU AI Act, MiFID II — all of these come with enforcement mechanisms. So when you pile rule upon rule that people neither read nor understand, you are not making them more compliant. You are making them more exposed. You are creating a system where the risk of unintentional violation grows with every new regulation, because the gap between what exists on paper and what people actually know widens continuously.
What We Should Do Instead
So what is the alternative? It is uncomfortable, and that is exactly why people avoid it. The alternative is thinking. Actual thinking. Understanding the rules we already have before asking for new ones. Reading the laws that are already in place. Interpreting them. Applying judgment.
There is no absolute right level of bureaucracy. We cannot function with zero rules, and we obviously cannot function with what we have now. But the path forward is not more legislation. The path forward is engaging with what already exists. In many cases, the answers are already there — in regulations that were written to be broad enough to cover most situations, if only someone would take the time to read them properly.
I advocate for relying on common sense. Whether in your private life or in business. Think carefully. Decide how you want to set up processes. Decide how you want to handle situations, customers, employees. Ask yourself which measures actually make sense in which context. If you follow that approach, you will need far fewer regulations than you think.
But this requires courage. It requires accepting responsibility for your decisions rather than hiding behind a rulebook. And that — right there — is the real reason we keep asking for more rules. Not because we need them. Because they are comfortable. Because they let us say, I was just following the rules. Because they transfer accountability from the individual to the system. And as long as that comfort is more attractive than the discomfort of independent thought, the spiral will continue.
Closing
So here is what I want you to sit with after this episode. Next time you catch yourself thinking — there should be a rule for that — stop. Ask instead: is there already a rule for that? Have I read it? Do I understand it? Or am I just asking for someone else to do my thinking for me?
That question might make you uncomfortable. Good. That means you have already started thinking. And thinking is the one thing no regulation can replace, no matter how well it is written. If you know someone — a colleague, a business owner, a decision maker — who is caught in this spiral of more rules, more complexity, more confusion, send them this episode. Because the only way we break the cycle is by having the courage to stop adding and start understanding.
I am André Daus. This is Iconoclast Insights. Challenge the satisfactory.
