[masklinn]

> Everything that you believe to be needless, may actually serve a very specific and important purpose.

It may or may not, and it may have served a purpose once upon a time but not anymore because the context has changed or because it's been superseded, it may have failed to achieve its goals or led to undesirable outcomes (either aside from its success or making the situation worse), it may have had a (now considered) horrendous purpose, …

That one must be careful with regulations and understand why they exist is more or less GP's entire point:

> deregulation is a difficult thing that must be done carefully

I like this old quip/aphorism that you shouldn't be able to ask for a law's removal if you don't know why it exists, though I'm not sure it's always feasible, especially for the older texts.

And of course the recorded purpose may not have been honest in the first place (see: many voting regulations in the US).