[Andhurati]

Steam engines have been around since the 1st century, but like guns, they weren't going to be as important as they could be without all the advancements in ideology, planning and sciences that resulted in industrialization.

Which brings me back to my point, the current status of civilization is due much less to legislation than people say it is.

[gamblor956]

If you specifically mean the existence of an elected group of people writing the laws matters less than people say it does, we agree.

But if you say that the systematic codification of rules (i.e., laws) matters less than people say it does, we disagree completely. Laws literally defined every major civilization back to the dawn of recorded human history.

For more modern examples, CA's employee rights laws are the reason that SV happened in SV rather than New York, Boston, Chicago, or Detroit--all cities with larger scientific and industrial bases than SF or LA. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act literally made the internet as it exists today possible; without it Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and even Amazon and Google couldn't exist as they do today.