Sometimes that's a good thing. "Understand[ing] the industry" often means buying into its bullshit and looking at the world from its self-interested perspective.
At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped.
As an example, from the FTC:
"Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market".
Who decides what "the merits" are, and who decides what the "market" is? They play a lot of games with these definitions. What are the merits in the smartphone business? Did apple abuse their position to unfairly take over the camera business? Is "cameras" even a market anymore? Is a camera so clearly part of a smartphone that it does indeed meet the definition of "merits"? Is Amazon abusing their position in e-commerce to take out the delivery business (fedex etc) by offering "free shipping" ? Is AWS abusing their position in IaaS to unfairly compete in the "server cpu" market? Is that even a market? Or is it not because x86 chips and ARM chips are thought of as different? Read the current case brought against Meta. The definition of "market" is... really pretty awful. Someone is just trying to make their career.
Only if you ignore most of the text of the congressional acts that have created them. If the FTC's charter consisted of that one paragraph, it would be a reasonable criticism. It doesn't, and it's not.
It's true that there's a reactionary movement in the current SCOTUS that comes up with very odd interpretations of these congressional acts (like concluding that CO2 is not a pollutant, and thereby can't be regulated as one), but just because Amy Coney legislates from the bench that the sky is green doesn't necessarily make it so.
And if you've ever interacted with an abusive corporation, you'll see that any rule, or lack of rule, which gives them more power over you, their customer/employee is obviously bad.
I, as a customer/employee/tenant would generally like my bank to not run off with my money after betting it all on red, my employer to not retaliate against me for reporting abuse, and my landlord to not throw me out on my ass because I complained about a rat infestation in his building.
Without any rules against unethical behavior, most organizations with power over you will happily turn to it, and will drive their more ethical competitors out of business.
Free market folks argue that the market can figure out every one of those things you mention. But most of them understand it isn't a free lunch.
I generally think that a case-by-case approach, with clear avenues for both rulemaking and redress, with democratic (direct or representative) control is a good starting point for solving this conundrum.
I allude to the problem of finding market solutions for ethics problems in the last part of my previous point. Markets do not optimize for ethical behaviour. Largely because of information assymetries, largely because people are not perfectly rational agents, largely because of the power imbalance that exists in many of them, and also largely because people are poor at measuring specific examples of long-tail risk.
Good rules also reduce market friction, because they let me make reasonable assumptions, like 'This product is probably not going to kill me when used as instructed, because it adheres to X, Y, Z objective standards', instead of having to go down an endless rabbit hole of 'Buyer beware, do your own research!'
This is speculation and pedantry, but: What if they do? What if they already weed out 90% of it, and the remaining stuff that you notice is the optimal amount given the cost to weed it out (no matter how said weeding is done).
It's the poster child for a perfect market environment, where everyone involved is simply trying to optimize their returns, and there are next to no rules. It's also full of hucksters, thieves, conmen, liars, and flat-out frauds, to the utter detriment of any legitimate commerce in the space.
The harder ones seem to be healthcare (massive info asymmetry) and anything related to pollution (externalities). The market has had time on those and not done so well.
Not the very much non-ideal, largely non-free markets we have, rife as they are with information asymmetry, non-commodity products, buyers with urgent time needs, and a host of other aspects that utterly invalidate the Free Market Will Solve Everything gospel that so many try to preach.
A competently regulated market is better than a "free" (ie, unregulated) market in nearly all situations.
Basically, classical economics is predicated on a knife-edge equilibrium that ironically needs government intervention in order to prevent people from deviating.
The point was that I didn't want to make the same mistakes, and I wanted to remind myself to be wary of "inside scoop" types of opinions, or placing too much weight on "reports from the frontlines", because I recognized that I was overly biased in this direction. Outsiders views, or fresh perspectives, as well as insights from a big picture also have value.
Every long gone institution or industry that now seems absurd with hindsight, also necessarily had some internal logic if it ever existed for decades.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...