I think you’re far too charitable toward the FDA, TSA et al. I submit that they simultaneously reduce slack, increase fragility … and reduce efficiency. They are best modeled as parasites, sapping resources from the host (the general public) for their own benefit.
[edit] Something I’ve been toying with is thinking of societal collapse as a scale-free distribution [1], from micro-collapse (a divorce, perhaps?) to Roman Empire events. In this model, a civilization-wide collapse doesn’t have a “cause” per se, it’s just a property of the system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
[Having finished Yudkowsky’s work, am deleting my post. It grew from a different narrative intent and wasn’t comfortable here.]