Comment by Frost1x

Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on.

Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive.

That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical.

I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.