Everyone should read or at least be familiar with Joseph Tainter and his research on societal collapse.

> “It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve… After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.”

Government regulation and intervention are one such contributor to complexity, and as Michael Huemer demonstrates in his paper In Praise of Passivity we are akin to medieval doctors administering medical procedures on society that are more likely to cause harm than create benefits.

It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline, and it pains me to no end to see people push for more regulation and government intervention. "The patient is getting sicker, we need to let more blood! Fetch me more leaches!"

The good news is that collapse, as Tainter puts it, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a return to less complexity, and it often brings great benefits to large swathes of people. For example, the collapse of the Roman Empire was beneficial to serfs who would actually welcome raiding parties into their villages.