I apologize for my impertinence, it seems to have distracted you such that you missed the point that I was making that regulations are neither an absolute good

I apologize for my impertinence, it seems to have distracted you such that you missed the point that I was making that regulations are neither an absolute good nor an absolute evil (despite what you read on the Internet). Using extreme examples in either direction to argue in favor of the other extreme doesn't convince anyone of any thing. There are lots of theories of government. Controlling externalities is really a special case of protecting individual rights, which is the role of government from my point of view. I'm not sure what is or isn't in your definition of 'government structure'. I was trying to point out that to the extent that we support an expansive scope of government regulation we create a situation where it is completely rational for people and organizations to expend considerable amounts of time and money to influence that process. If instead we support a limited scope of government regulation that diminishes the pressure to influence regulations.