NO ONE BUT A HARDCORE anarchist would deny the need for some government regulations, but the scope, level, and number of them is a legitimate subject for debate.

The position of President Obama appears to be that a major cause of the current financial crisis and many of the nation’s other problems was an over reliance on unconstrained capitalism. His answer is more regulations, bigger government and an end to the shift in political philosophy of the Democratic Party that began with President Clinton’s 1996 announcement that “the era of big government is over.”

The idea held by many politicians and government bureaucrats that simply passing a new law or issuing a new regulation will solve a problem is a common one. Unfortunately, once a new regulation is turned over to the bureaucrats who administer it, the focus becomes the regulation, not the problem it was created to solve, and common sense goes out the window. The resulting mindset also ensures that most regulations can easily be circumvented.

Immediately after World War I, a debate arose within the U.S. Army over whether the newly developed weapon called the tank should belong to the infantry or the cavalry. Disregarding the opinion of Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, the Congress decided that tanks should belong only to the infantry and added that restriction to the 1920 National Defense Act. The cavalry responded by renaming its tanks “combat cars.” This subterfuge apparently didn’t disturb Congress very much, as indicated by a 1939 Senate report on the Army that noted that the cavalry’s combat cars were “much like tanks.”

In Britain, when the waiting times in hospital emergency rooms became inordinately long, the government-run National Health Service mandated that patients must be treated within four hours. The new rule didn’t shorten waiting times, but patients are now held in ambulances outside the hospital until the emergency room can treat them within the required time.

The standard bureaucratic response to correct such problems is to add more regulations to close the perceived loopholes that allowed the earlier rule to be sidestepped. Unfortunately, legislators prefer to pass regulations as part of massive omnibus bills such as the recent stimulus package that members of Congress admitted never having read. Although such bills make it difficult to hold any specific legislator accountable for the results, they virtually ensure unintended consequences.

The stimulus package had no sooner passed than many members of Congress began expressing outrage over the bonuses for AIG executives that were authorized by the bill the individuals expressing outrage had just voted for.

Once passed, regulations are almost never rescinded. They do, however, increase in complexity to the point where almost no one understands them. A perfect example is the thousands of pages of U.S. tax code. We now have both a chairman of the House committee that writes our tax laws and a secretary of the treasury charged with enforcing them who failed to pay all their taxes because they claimed not to understand the tax laws. Could there be a more striking illustration of the need to simplify the tax code and change it from a weapon with which to punish or reward selected groups to a straightforward tool for raising the revenue necessary to fund the government?

Over time, regulations in any bureaucracy not only become more complex and difficult to follow; they sometimes become impossible to obey. More than once during my military career, I encountered situations in which following one regulation literally forced me to violate another one.

It is also important to point out that regulations by themselves are useless if they are not enforced. Unfortunately, many legislators and bureaucrats who are quick to institute new regulations are reluctant to enforce them. Millions of illegal aliens are currently living in the United States. The problem is not a lack of laws to deal with illegal immigration. The problem is that politicians from both parties have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of the courage needed to either enforce the current laws or change them.

The result of these various problems with regulations is that they often end up creating bigger problems than the ones they were supposed to solve. Such cases are common, but perhaps the most relevant one today involves the so-called “wall” that before 9/11 restricted the sharing of information between U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

This wall evolved over time through both legislation and administrative regulations in response to charges that various intelligence agencies were violating the rights of American citizens. Unfortunately, that same wall was a major reason that the CIA and FBI were unable to connect the pieces of information available about al-Qaida terrorists in the United States that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

It is most unlikely that President Obama will move his administration in the direction of the limited role for the federal government laid out in the Constitution. It is equally unlikely, however, that adding new regulations to the already massive body of current ones will solve the nation’s many problems without laying the groundwork for even bigger problems further down the line.

Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC Ret.), a monthly contributor, is a military historian and a professor emeritus of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense.