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One of the Anglo things that is commonly criticized in continental Europe is the judicial system. The complaint is usually formulated as "I wouldn't want to delegate the question of guilt to twelve randos that have no understanding of the law". My usual rebuke used to be "if the prosecutor can't explain to random person what the defendant did wrong, what good is this law he's allegedly broken?"
But recently I understood that the benefit of the jury system goes deeper. Most people (citation needed) want to be law-abiding, upstanding citizens. Let's say the laws are so complex that only a judge with a law degree can determine whether someone has broken the law or not. How then can anyone else be sure they are a law-abiding citizen? We want that IQ 85 guy in an ill-fitting rented suit to know deep inside if he's guilty or not. If the law is an overwrought monstrosity that overwhelms the jury, their reasonable doubt about the circumstances of the case is the intended outcome. Laws that govern everyone must be clear to everyone.
If the law can't be written and explained in simplified english than it shouldn't exist. Ditto for whatever congress gets up to, if the congress critters can't stand up and recite it rote from memory it doesn't get voted on.
There are areas of law which are technical and complex for good reasons - the examples I normally give are aviation safety and bank capital adequacy. "We shouldn't have bank capital adequacy regulation" is a position which is only taken seriously by the kind of nutcase who thinks we shouldn't have fractional-reserve banks. "We shouldn't have aviation safety regulation" is taken seriously by a libertarian fringe, though as far as I can see not by most pilots. (It is the general aviation orgs who lead the lobbying effort against privatising ATC in the US).
Spending bills are, of course, technical and complex because the government they fund is. (And would still be even if the government stuck to core functions - the military budget is the most complex and technical of the lot.)
No private sector CEO could recite from memory his organisation's full internal rulebook in a complex, technical, safety-critical area. Any CEO who tried would be considered dangerously irresponsible. Above a certain size of organisation, the CEO wouldn't be able to recite the budget down the the line item.
That said, laws can and should be written clearly such that a 110 IQ non-lawyer with a passing familiarity with any relevant technical content can understand them.
The rate of credit can be set by the market, and so can industry standards. Just because bureaucrats really think that they are improving the world because giving them power to do things is better than not doing things doesn't mean it's true.
The debate as to whether the Federal Reserve system magnifies or smoothens the business cycle and its crises is still wide open and the stranglehold of the FAA has so totally destroyed personal aviation that we don't have flying cars despite the technology having been widely available since the 1910s. You can insinue Milton Friedman was a crank, that doesn't make it true.
Bureaucrats want to be the ruling class, and their political formula is "the world is complex, so you need us experts to synthesize rules to handle that complexity, therefore we rule".
All well and good for bureaucrats. But like all political formulas, this is total bullshit. It's exactly as true as the divine right of kings. Which is to say that it's only politically true. And only inasmuch as the bureaucrats are good stewards of their imperium.
But it is plain to see now, to anyone with eyes, that they are terrible stewards.
Thus these empty boasts about the inherent need for the legions of bureaucrats and their superior claim to necessity ring as hollow as ever. No you don't need these people, in fact the chaos of their disappearance, however regrettable, would be a vast improvement over their continued rule.
The FAA has surely mangled personal aviation, but the lack of flying cars is probably better laid at the feet of the NHTSA. In order to be light enough to make any sense flying, flying vehicles have to be pretty fragile. Far too fragile for the NHTSA to approve letting them get in accidents at 70MPH on the interstate.
I haven't been continuing to follow it, but in the last decade and a half or so, I remember seeing a variety of start-ups make minor headlines about how they were getting into the flying car space. I always chuckled when I would dig into their materials and see that they were already claiming at the beginning that they'd be limited to something like 25-45MPH on the road. They're just not going to get a plethora of buyers with that type of restriction, even assuming they could make the rest of the product pretty decent and also survive FAA.
To eyeball some numbers, possibly the lightest passenger vehicle to barely squeek by highway safety standards would be the Smart Fortwo. The curb weight includes fluids, but was originally around 1600lbs. Eyeballing light aircraft (unfortunately, only listing empty weight), we'll start from that weight. After all, we've gotta add wings (eyeballing at least 150sqft of them; not sure where we're going to put them while driving), flying-to-driving-and-back-to-flying mechanisms, including shifting our powertrain to a propeller, flight control equipment, not sure if our suspension will survive landing, etc. Are we going to need STOL ability? Most potential flying car owners aren't gonna get hype about having to drive to their local airport anyway to take off... and then find another local airport to land. I think we're gonna need at least a couple hundred horsepower, but the Smart came with like 45-60hp to start (maybe 100hp later1, but it's not clear from the wiki article how much that affected the weight). But we're definitely going to get beefier, and that comes with additional powertrain weight, fuel weight, etc. Weight truly is the most predominant factor in aircraft design.
Maybe an Elon Musk tier person could thread the needle (and I guess he made comments to that effect in the last year), but I think it's still gonna be hard. I sort of doubt heavy batteries with an electric drivetrain is going to solve this problem, either.
1 - As an added note on the timeline for when technology existed, engines were much less efficient long ago.
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