Regulations and regulators are awesome right up until they are captured, and then they can be worse than no solution, especially when the "solution" comes with immunity from civil suits.

And yet despite a century of ever increasing regulations mining and factory injury and death rates have somehow not gone back up to their 1900 levels as you seem to claim they should have.

> as you seem to claim they should have.

Please don't do that. I said nothing of the sort. Plus what you did, besides being the "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort of disgusting attack, is also whataboutism.

The thing about workplace safety is that a) employers don't relish their employees getting hurt or dying on the job, b) employers don't benefit when their employees get hurt or die on the job, so even if there were no regulations employers would still not go back to 120 years ago states of workplace safety, c) regulations here can help force employers to make better calculations regarding costs and benefits of improving workplace safety as it's on the improvement side that the costs mostly lie. So you see, there is not much benefit to the industry in capturing the regulator for the purpose of undoing workplace safety regulations.

Regulations that don't solve a problem won't solve a problem.

Lots and lots of regulations are ok to exist only as long as they do something useful. If they are useless, piling more useless ones isn't better than the alternative.

On the real world, we tend to have plenty of the useless ones, and only a few of the very useful ones. When someone complain about the first set, people are quick to throw the second set at them like if it addressed the problem.