I sometimes wish there were Talmudic-like annotated regulations that discourse upon the history and context of each regulation, down to the precise punctuation mark, word, line when those granularities have meaning, so we don't have to hold these "what was the reason" conversations in public, and have more meaningful conversations over "with hindsight, was the original reason justified" to add to those annotations.
I worked for a bank for about three months last year, specifically on the ACH processing system.
I had previously kind of bought into the cryptocurrency crap about how "bloated" and "draconian" the banking system in the US was, and that's an easy narrative to fall into...the ACH standard is 800+ pages long! Surely us genius software engineers can do better than all these dumb financial regulators.
But as I read through the standard (I'll admit I mostly skimmed, 800 pages of dry financial text isn't exactly exhilarating stuff), I learned that, actually, most of these rules are actually pretty reasonable. It turns out that sending money between people is actually a pretty complicated thing, with tons of edge cases that you have to consider (e.g. How do you deal with fraudulent transactions? How do you deal with situations where you send money to a dozen accounts but one of the account numbers is wrong? Which transactions need to be reversible? etc.).
Definitely having a "why" attached to every single regulation could be helpful. I'm not going to claim that every regulation associated with finance is (still) necessary, but it's rarely as cut and dry as it initially seems.
What I would like for law (which regulations are a type of) is for it to be stored in a public git repository. I want to be able to access that to see who drafted a law, when it was merged into ratified/voted law (and who voted it in), when it was repealed, and so on.
I understand the appeal certainly, but unfortunately in practice it is real case of sausage making. Where at best the reason for clause X,Y, or Z was 'so it would get passed even though it is utterly irrelevant' at best or at worst 'cynically exploiting a moral panic or corruption'.
It's called a history book, and the problem is that a lot of the people who yell about removing "red tape" have read those history books and want to do the things the red tape was literally created to prevent, which is usually lie to someone to make money, and then millions of Americans who think reading history books is woke get very very upset that they can't give their money to companies that need to change the law to be allowed to lie.
Look at crypto. That's literally a system with very little """red tape""" and it's nothing more than a breeding ground for fraudulent investments because the company that promises 10% but literally cannot deliver will always beat out the companies that promise 4% but can mostly safely deliver that. If there's no punishment for lying, honest companies are at a disadvantage, because a market is not a transparent system, you cannot know the internal workings of a company that isn't required to make that info public.
