Regulation often takes bizarre forms. The May 23, 1908 NYT has an example:

The orders issued by the Board of Health of New York City, requiring that all persons who milk cows must wear white duck overalls and jackets, otherwise the milk will not be allowed to enter New York, has placed the majority of the milk producers in a predicament.

We'll get to the predicament in a second, but why white overalls? Was white considered more hygienic or was the thinking that white overalls would make it easier for an inspector to determine if a worker was despoiled by cow poop? Interest group theory would predict that a lobbyist who made white overalls manipulated the regulation at the expense of her competitors who made yellow overalls or blue overalls.

But what is the predicament in which the dairy farmers find themselves? Pesky humans who don't necessarily want to do what the Board of Health says:

Much of the milking has heretofore been done by the wives and daughters of farmers all of whom declare they will never don the overalls. The farmers think they cannot afford to dispense with their female help, and they are at a loss to know what to do.

In the short run, the farmers are in a pickle if their help won't work because of exogenously mandated regulations. In the medium run, the dairy farmers could hire replacement workers - the wages paid might be higher than a farmer might have paid his wife or daughter, but the hired help might be more productive (as pointed out this little-cited article). In the long run, if mom and daughter refuse to wear white overalls, and the hired help is proving too expensive, then technology would (and did) advance to provide a reasonable substitute for labor.

I don't pretend that white overalls led to the technological change that would eventually displace mom and daughter from their milking pails (which in itself was probably not a bad thing, not withstanding the protestations of some). However, blind bureaucracy passing mandates from above might well have such perverse effects: witness the outcomes of No Child Left Behind, Americans with Disabilities Act, our current ethanol mandate, and watch out for the "2008 farm bill" which is without-any-concept-of-irony formally called "The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008."