There is a deep irony in writing an over-worded essay that effectively says 'I don't like it when people outside my profession regulate my actions'. Keep It Simple, Stooge.
No no, its the 'talkers' ruining it for the 'builders', surely. Not like people in a given industry ever want regulations. Please don't look up Louis Rossma-
Regulations that usually help people:
- anti-dumping and pollution regulations - regulations that mandate disclosing added sugar on packaging labels - regulations that protect workers in endogenous bargaining disputes.
Regulations that usually hurt people:
- single-family zoning - price ceilings
Regulations are just laws that force businesses to behave a certain way. And laws can be good or bad, because lawmakers can be corrupted by money or ideology, or because laws can have unintended consequences. Regulations are not good or bad in the abstract.
The mindset that all current regulations are good is quite toxic, actually, because there are quite a lot of bad regulations that would improve regular people's lives if they were removed or refactored.
Regulations give people who have a stake in a given resource a seat at the table, even if they're not part of the regulated business' plans. The examples you gave have negative effects, but they also highlight how ill equipped the industries that have them are with dealing with some problems.
The correct response to seeing that some regulations are malicious is to fix the regulations and to address the ways that affected parties were not adequately represented before the regulation was ratified.
The correct response is not to take a philosophical stance against regulation. Taking the philosophical stance conflates a data point with a trend, and also means we get to question the idea of representation at all in a Democratic system (which, if you're against Democratic processes, that's a whole different kettle of fish).
My issue is with extremist views on regulations, which I now see that you don't hold. I rarely see people on the populist left advocating for specific bad regulations to be repealed or even refactored, unless it happens to clash with a hot button social issue they care about such as discrimination. It's the pragmatic center-left neoliberals who are doing that job. The populist left's entire focus is on adding more regulations, and often bad ones such as price ceilings (mixed with some good ones, of course). Don't get me started on the populist right who are only interested in regulating other people's private social choices. The Texas GOP platform is effectively ancap + social conservatism. And I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence between the populist left and the populist right in the current moment - the populist right is significantly more insane right now.
To be explicit, I think pinning things on the left or right gives people a way to characterise a problem which should be inspected analytically.
For example, painting climate change as a 'leftist' cause is not ideal. That's because calling it leftist is common tactic to paint climate scientists as comparable to marginalised groups (who are seen as easier to tease).
The issue here is that it detracts from the practicality of the climate action discussion (what are the bottlenecks for each option, vested interests and what to do, etc) and its in poor taste to the marginalised groups.
The only really dumb position is that fewer regulations = better always.
For example, there are tons of building codes that keep houses from falling down, and make them livable in many other ways. Those seem good. Others that say that we shouldn't poison the air or water too much. Also good.
So yes, much of the consumer protection is working very well thank you. There are a few places where we went overboard and need to cut back.
For specific instances of corruption relating to construction, this is detailed across a few FriendlyJordies videos but I'm strung for a link right now. Will comment if I find it later.
Edit: there's also this https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/n...
But you're probably thinking about communist California that passed prop 13 and a bunch of other regulations in the decades before it even became majority Democrat.