Most economic regulations we have today exist because a government was trying to patch over a market failure. The US has Medicare, for example, because American

Most economic regulations we have today exist because a government was trying to patch over a market failure. The US has Medicare, for example, because Americans were appalled that senior citizens were dying because they couldn't afford health care. Similarly, workplace safety regulations exist because Americans were appalled that employees were getting mangled and killed by the thousands in dangerous work environments; and so on. We can argue over whether a particular regulation was the best approach (maybe a smart incentives-based approach would work better than a prohibition, for example); and we can argue over whether a given regulation still makes sense in changing economic circumstances. However, it requires a special kind of dogmatic myopia to insist against all evidence to the contrary that markets are self-correcting, that positive and negative externalities either don't exist or don't matter, and that the best way to deal with disasters (like a restaurant poisoning thousands of customers with e. coli infection due to unsanitary food handling) is to let the market sort it out.