As a pragmatist, one of my favorite phrases I say quite often: "The difference between theory and reality is that in theory there is no difference."

The article is excellent expose of an issue and a solution. I hope they would include specific things we can do to help improve the situation. I'm part of California YIMBY, which promotes legislation that helps ease these issues.

Hmm, I prefer the phrasing:

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is a difference.

Mine is intentionally convoluted. It works for two things: 1- Easy to spot people who really aren't paying attention to what you say. 2- It takes a second to understand the point, people remember better when they have to 'figure it out' so to speak. 3- I get a smile from some people if they pause, think it, then understand.

I might be wrong in my assumptions though.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/practice-and-theory/

This "practice and theory" quote was said by someone, but who exactly said it first was lost to time. Its not going to be possible to find the canonical quote (since the cannon-quote seems to be nonexistant). But its definitely a long-running idiom with some history.

When I said 'mine'/'yours' I simply meant what we use.

I tend to presume that originality is near impossible with such pithy sentences. For quotes, I only quote things I actually read from the author.

One criticism of "Everything will balance itself out by itself thinking" is that it leads to exploited people. Regulations are one of the tools intended to prevent such things. Nothing is perfect. But the result is we end up arguing about "I pay too much for this" where we would have been arguing about "This guy died making this" if the regulation did not exist.

You are perfectly correct, that some level of regulation saves lives. I doubt thread parent would disagree. A discussion of which regulations are beneficial and which go too far would be interesting. Unfortunately that discussion was short-circuited by a banal list of wiki entries that could have been generated by a bot.

Dictators acting in the interests of the giant multinational corporations that support them. Did you look at the links I posted? I think you're imaginging some sort of firewall between "market" and "government" but no such separation exists. Buying politicians, funding armies, and bribing dictators are all simply economic activities with pros and cons that — in the absence of stern regulation prohibiting — corporations are happy to do.

Which is not to say that all regulation is bad. No one in this thread has claimed that. Some people have pointed out specific problems with specific regulations related to housing and urban planning. I really wish you would respond to those specifics, rather than posting generalities that require extensive exegesis to even relate to the topic under discussion.