ITAR comes to mind. Its basically bans export of dual-use (mil/civ) technologies. Its has made for incalculable harm to our aerospace industry and other industries that produce things that are classed dual use (encryption used to be one of them). This is the same law that banned encryption.

You have things like companies in Aviation Week (a big aerospace industry mag/site) running full page ads for sensors and other aerospace items proudly claiming its ITAR free (means not made/designed in US). A company I worked for bought a high power (2.5kW) laser from Germany. It failed and cannot be sent back to Germany for repair due to ITAR (tooling needed to fix it cannot be easily moved and probably would fall under ITAR). High end CNC machine tools will brick themselves if they are moved without the manufacturer specifically blessing the move due to ITAR regulations (earthquakes can trigger the "I've been moved without permission" response).

There is a countless list of other harms it has caused, but I have no direct experience with. ITAR is fairly easy to get around for the "bad guys" because they can just not buy US goods.

How about the DMCA? It's routinely abused; it's easy to issue takedown notices and difficult to defend against them.

e-cigs. We don't know their exact relative harmfulness/safety, but there is fairly broad consensus that 'vaping' is better for your health than cigarettes.

Clearly more work needs to be done to rigorously investigate and evolve the space, but recent Federal regulations have essentially put small innovators out of business.

In sum: a harm-reducing item is being regulated into the ground.

Some HIPAA regulations that pre-date the rise of shared virtual servers in "the cloud" are quite outdated and cause quite a bit of trouble for no real benefit.

The law that allows the Government to access all cloud-hosted emails that are older then 6 months, without a warrant.

> Can you think of a concrete example where the government got it wrong?

Stem cell research.

The VA Healthcare debacle. The government was unable to timely provide healthcare and instead of trying to fix the problem they hid and covered it up by falsefying records. The new system they made is complexly incompetent where doctors and patains are force to spend days on the phone with people who have no clue what they are doing.

Software patents.