> Quite apart from that, you do agree that laws and regulations have economic properties too, right? Why can't we buy and sell those?

I'm not sure if you get my point. It's not the fact that patentable subject matter has economic properties that warrants protection, it's what those properties happen to be. Things like drug design are susceptible to the free-rider problem, an propertization is a legal tool that can address that problem. Vast swaths of the law can be seen as basically existing to address various economic problems that undermine markets, and the free-rider problem is a common one and propertization is a typical solution.

There are economic issues created by laws and regulations (regulatory capture, etc), but they are not the kind of problems amenable to being solved by propertization.