Many politicians are not about helping people, many are about helping themselves. Also, sometimes you can harm people with the intention of helping them

The entire concept of "more or less regulation" is partisan ideology. Every regulation has a cost and a benefit. Good regulations have benefits in excess of their costs.

The problem is that calculating the cost is very difficult. You may have a regulation that increases costs by $10 and produces a $12 benefit. But if the $10 cost increase drives a competitor out of business and allows the remaining provider to raise prices by $20 in total, you're now paying $20 for a $12 benefit.

They also have opportunity costs. You may have a regulation that consumes $20 of a $30 surplus but produces $50 in diffuse positive externalities, which sounds like a good idea. But if there is an alternative that also consumes $20 of the same $30 surplus and produces $500 in positive externalities, you can't have both ($40 > $30) and enacting the first one is really destroying $450 in benefits relative to the second. Trying to enact both is even worse, because then you get neither one and even destroy any benefits inherent in the original transaction.

It's so easy to screw this up that it's better to err on the side of not regulating something than to convince yourself you gained $30 when you really destroyed $1000.

The regulations you want are the ones that have unambiguous, huge net benefits, like prohibiting people from dumping toxic waste in the river, because the cost is low and the benefit is enormous. But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because there is a way to do it for $10,000.

And the incentives are wrong for people to carefully evaluate things like this, because the people paying the cost aren't the people creating the rules.

Which means "all regulation is bad" is false but "any given regulation is bad" is a solid heuristic.

Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having not set up that regulation at all. The government spending e.g. 1M on experts hired to check whether, say, oil pipelines are built to spec and standards, and not break unexpectedly - is much better for everyone involved overall, than the company operating the pipeline paying hundreds of millions for the cleanup of the resulting environmental damage. Same goes for pretty much any and every other industry that we actually depend on. Yes, sure, be careful if possible - but personally, I’d rather see inefficient spending on necessary regulation than no regulation at all. Because then we’d definitely be picking up the bill for it, maybe not always directly with our wallets or government budgets, but we lose either way.

I do agree with the rest of your points.

Which is why those kinds of regulations are the ones you want.

But it's still worth carefully revisiting them from time to time, because $40,000/company/year is still literally having each company hire a person to waste their entire working life. This is what regulators should optimally be spending most of their time on -- evaluating the existing regulations for ways to reduce the costs without losing the benefit.

That's ridiculous. The Free Market is one of the greatest economic tools we've ever discovered, and hybrid distributed representative/micro constitutional monarchies a successful governance/innovation model. Together they're the foundation for most of modern business and are a direct creation of regulation and maintained by the same. The Free Market has requirements for operation like any tool. I really have trouble understanding how you could argue that business would be better off under mercantilism and aristocracy or any other older, less efficient system. They don't work as well in known theory and haven't worked as well in practice either.

Good vs bad governance is very important, but "more" vs "less" not so much. Just like anything else implementation matters the most.

And I'm saying you're wrong since the Free Market and our current governance models and public buy-in and wealth distributions have led the greatest business success and innovation in the entirety of human history. Good intervention from government has been fantastic for business.

http://www.multpl.com/us-population-growth-rate

Maybe we just don't need more stuff.

Edit: Carlin quote

Ever notice how your shit is stuff and other peoples stuff is shit?

...and one we've rarely employed. Most markets are absolutely not free in the libertarian sense, and while often for near-sighted politics—such as tariffs for goods—also sometimes for the greater good. For example, antitrust legislation is market regulation as truly free markets tend to converge in a winner-takes-all fashion. And once there are only a handful of large corporations left they tend to start shunning down the market from entry-level companies to help cementing their own position, via make-do regulation of their own and/or lobbying for more robust government-appointed regulation.

1.) Pretty much any regulation harms business.

2.) Also, consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway,

If consumers pay for the regulation, then the business is not harmed. But think about how silly that would sound if you said that to a business person: "Don't worry about government regulations, because your customers will pay for them!"

This is an old fallacy:

"consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway"

Consumers don't pay for regulations except in those situations where demand for a product/service outstrips supply, and therefore the businesses are able to pass the cost along to the consumers. But wherever supply outstrips demand, then the businesses pay for the regulation themselves, via reduced profits and therefore reduced market value.

This is simple supply and demand. It is remarkable that so many people are often mislead on this subject.

This doesn't make sense. Demand may outstrip supply at a certain price, but that just means that the price must go up.

If a market is clearing, then the regulation (or a tax) will be borne by buyers or sellers in proportion to the relationship between the supply and demand elasticities.