That seems like a terrible idea because people forget why useful regulations where needed.

Lead is never going to be safe. Julius Caesar's engineer, Vitruvius, reported, "water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from lead pipes.“ Lead was added to cheap wine illegally in the 18th and early 19th centuries as a sweetener.. Note the illegal bit because we knew it was toxic.

But fast forward and... In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans.[231] In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by the lead industry associates.[232][233]

Read the history and we just keep discovering the same issues over and over again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning Yet, we still keep adding it to various products today and people still get significant exposure.

Really interesting that the Romans already knew that lead pipes were bad. To be fair, though, they had a lot of other spurious beliefs, and I can understand why people would have assumed it was just superstition. Especially since the toxicity is very slow.

> That seems like a terrible idea because people forget why useful regulations were needed.

To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made, so that the case is simply ready to be made when the sun is due to set.

Neither contemporary recordings nor history books are hard to find.

But the people who have something to gain by unwisely rolling back regulation, and who have money to buy themselves platforms, are deliberately not talking about the reasons the laws exist, so short of something more akin to state control of media, what are you going to do?

> To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made

Whether and why a practice is useful generally has little or nothing to do with people's understanding of whether and why it is useful. The arguments people advance for everything, including valuable things, are almost uniformly nonsense and easy to disprove.

So, a record of why laws are made wouldn't really serve any purpose.

Laws should be measured against the reasons they were created.

If you start doing a good thing for a bad reason, you should stop?

An alternative would be if instead of sunset provisions laws are made to explicitly include testable goals, and a process for challenging them by proving they don't achieve their intended goal.

On the other hand, what about autism and vaccines? Or wifi emissions?

and I wonder what they will say about cellphone radiation in 30 years? (or some time in the future where there's not a strong litiginous cellphone industry)

We already have an example of how sunset provisions work in the US: the federal budget and tax ceiling. What ends up happening is that some politicians hold the sunsetting provision hostage to get their pet issue. Imagine if instead furloughing federal workers, we had the Purge.