Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way. Very often regulation starts lean, then inevitably some assholes take advantage of it to their profit, so the regulation…
I think the single biggest roadblock to building new things is regulation. How do we eliminate most regulations, and simplify the rest to fight off regulatory capture? What if we had a github for laws and required that anybody who worked on a law use their real name and if they were paid by a company they had to list how much?
I've heard from a friend of mine who used to work for Deloitte (or similar kind of company) that on practical level, lawmaking often happens in those private consulting/lawyer's offices - it's not like a MPs sits down and write stuff down themselves. So the git commit would say "John Smith the lawyer" which tells you nothing.
There's probably also so many patches and reverts and rewrites going on that history would be really bloated. Or if you want nice history, you lose all those important nuances you wanted in first place ("who exactly put this comma here which changes the whole meaning?").
It would also probably horrendously slow down the law making process. (which might actually be a good thing in many scenarios!)