Well, safety features also benefit the people who ride in your car with you, and those people weren't necessarily involved in your purchasing decision.

There's a happy medium somewhere. In an ideal world, we would regulate what is really important and ignore what isn't, but we're still figuring things out.

Personally, I like the idea of universal sunsets to deal with the difficulty of repealing old regulations. Codes could be reviewed on an N-year basis, with old rules requiring a cost/benefit analysis and 'yes' vote to renew. But in practice, those kinds of processes seem to end up with people rubber-stamping "last year++" revisions, like with the USA's defense re-authorization acts.