This picture is illegal in California

Or rather, the action being performed in that picture is illegal in California. It's not that the lettuce is not organic or anything. It's that it is evidence of someone working during their lunch break:

I mentioned earlier that we had struggled to comply with California meal break law. The problem was that my workers needed extra money, and so begged me to be able to work through lunch so they could earn a half-hour more pay each day. They said they would sign a paper saying they had agreed to this. Little did I know that this was a strategy devised by a local attorney who understood meal break litigation better than I. What he knew, but I didn't, was that based on new case law, a company had to get the employee's signature every day, not just once, to avoid the meal break penalties. The attorney advised them they could get the money for working lunch AND they could sue later for more money (which he would get a cut of). Which is exactly what they did, waiting until November to sue so they could get some extra money to pay for Christmas bills. This is why -- believe it or not -- it is now a firing offense at our company to work through lunch in California.

Eventually a system becomes so encrusted by such nonsense that nothing useful can ever be done and all that can be is to chase the paper around in ever decreasing circles. That is arguably what happened to the Ottoman Empire, various incarnations of the various Indian and Chinese empires and so on and on. It's one of the reasons that we here shout so loudly about regulation and the necessity of a bonfire of much of it.

We do not say that there should not be regulation, not at all. But we do say that we need to carefully consider who is doing the regulating. There are times and circumstances when it does need to be the bureaucrat or the politician. But far more often tasks that they take upon themselves will be better regulated through what we might call simple market processes. Markets are, after all, just the interaction of voluntary behaviour and surely we can trust two adults to agree between themselves about whether someone might usefully check a spreadsheet, or not, while munching on a salad?