The real sting here isn't that laws are useless—it's that they're fundamentally a *symptom* rather than a cure, addressing the gap between our aspirations and our actual character. Plato is pointing to something we see in corporate scandals or traffic enforcement: regulations proliferate precisely because enough of us lack the internal compass that laws try to impose externally. What makes this unsettling is the implication that you cannot legislate virtue into existence, only manage its absence—which means a society's health depends less on the cleverness of its rulebook and more on the actual moral development of its citizens, a far messier problem than writing better policy.