US Citizens are not served by their government; they are burdened with it. The EPA is arguing for preventing companies from accountability for poisoning us. That should tell you quite a bit about the depth of the rot.
I went with Pop Os, had a little stability and audio issues, and went with Arch. Everything works really well now. YMMV. I took the opposite extreme; the only things running are the things that I enabled. It took a little more work, and it was worth the afternoon it took.
Governments are formed by single cultures with a shared value set, and a set of ethics that they believe in. Your statement that laws aren't needed until they are is accurate.
As those shared values are lost, the ethics built upon them erode, more laws are constructed. However, there comes a point where this system of check and balance can no longer function properly, and eventually, the system either becomes too unwieldy to function, or else the system is destroyed due to rebellion or anarchy.
Why? Because law is an attempt to encode ethics based on shared values. No culture which does not share values can long endure when attempting to solve the problem through increasingly complex rules with no underlying theme.
We do teach people parenting. The action is called parenting.
I teach my kids how to parent by practicing it. I learned how to parent my children by observing my boomer parents, and doing the opposite in nearly every circumstance.