This is where we have to say, "It depends." Laws that throw up barriers to selling drugs without expensive testing and jumping through regulatory hoops are not

This is where we have to say, "It depends." Laws that throw up barriers to selling drugs without expensive testing and jumping through regulatory hoops are not there just to protect the profits of Big Pharma. But some laws definitely exist to perpetuate crony capitalism. See the rules that make it nearly impossible to start a new bank in Canada. And some laws exist to protect consumers from entrepreneurs that move fast and break the lives of people who trust them. See the history of banking before there were laws restricting banks. Note that these are the same laws, performing different purposes at different times. This touches on Chesterton's Fence: It might be a good idea to remove a lot of the regulation around banking in Canada, but not without understanding all of the problems that those laws were designed to fix, and making sure that whatever replaces those laws serves the same purpose. All-too-often, we hear "We no longer need that protection, circumstances have changed." This is often naïve, as the reason circumstances have changed is the presence of those outdated laws. Remove them, and we revert back to the circumstances that led us to create the laws in the first place.