What the article is pointing out is the problem caused by the fact that we never repeal anything. Some problem happens, some regulation is put in place to deal with it and now that regulation is permanent. Next year some other problem happens and some regulation is put in place to deal with it. Each seems reasonable on its own but after a hundred years when you put them all together it turns a $5 million project into a $5 billion project.

But it doesn't really address why we never repeal anything, and it's in large part because we keep doing too much at too high a level of government. A thousand years ago a population the size of New York City would have been a nation, but now it's a city inside of a county inside of a state inside of a union. And the union is inside of a set of international treaties.

It's too many layers of bureaucracy. People keep advocating laws at the highest level where they can get them passed, which both makes them harder to fix because they're further removed from the affected people and more likely to cause trouble because any flaws are amplified by the larger affected population.

The flaw seems to be that people think federal legislation is less complex than local legislation, under the theory that uniformity reduces complexity. But in practice what happens is that you end up with 10,000 pages of federal regulations instead of each city having their own 20 pages, and then not being able to fix anything because San Francisco and Houston can't agree which rule one should impose on the other when the sensible choice is to let each do what they want.