There are rules and laws, like taxes and regulations. These are meant to effect the underlying economy; they are not the underlying economy itself. The economy naturally emerges as people make trades based on what they believe their local optima.
We can (and probably should) do things to try to change peoples' perceptions of their local optima to better align with what we believe to better approximate global optima, but people won't simply accept the dictation of a new optimum if it doesn't align or compute internally. It has to make sense to them or they won't make the trades we want to incentivize.
The tax code is such a complex disaster for precisely this reason. It's the most direct way the government has to bias or influence the economy toward certain trades and away from others, so they adjust the tax system to try to affect the calculation of one's local optimum for a given trade.
The debate over which rules, regulations, incentives, and disincentives work best, as well as the holistic systemic approaches that tend to result in the best overall outcomes, is an entire field of academic study called "economics".
Economies cannot be trivially changed by fiat any more than the weather can. Yes, we have governmental standards around meteorology, but making a law that all thermometers must now read 74 degrees F does not magically modify the underlying system. It does not change the actual factors that occurring in the physical world. It just creates a credibility-destroying facade.
The same is true in economics. Pretending otherwise is simple naivete.
