Why do they think the cure for bad legislation is more legislation?

Listening to a conversation in the Gym this morning between two guys who were discussing the changes to planning to enable councils to limit the amount of Bookmakers in an effort to control the spread of Fixed Odds Betting Machines and it got me thinking about the government and particularly why the government always tries to legislate its way out of trouble, even when the trouble is caused by Bad Legislation.

This is a classic example. basically the government were worried about FOB terminals and so they legislated that shops couldn't have more than 4 terminals, the problem with this kind of "blanket" legislation is that it doesn't consider any specific circumstances, so a shop where the demand can only support 1 terminal is viewed no differently than a shop where demand can support 20. Now as Supply will always follow demand the obvious (To all but the government) result is that the area that wants 20 terminals will get 5 shops.

Now that the inevitable has happened the complaint is that there are too many betting shops and so councils should have power to refuse them, basically trying to legislate out of a problem that the original legislation caused. It does actually appear to me that all of this legislation is caused by one simple issue, They don't trust you enough to make decisions about your own life, but they are not willing to say that out loud.

So here is a crazy idea, why not allow demand to regulate supply, remove all the legislation and that way each area will only have the FOBTs that the people using them want, and there will only be as many bookmakers as the economy can support. (Although you should think about if you really want to reduce the amount of bookmakers on the high street, these are after all people's jobs and tax paying businesses.)