This is sort of like "communism works, but everybody who's tried it so far was doing it wrong". Regulations lack any kind of competitive mechanism to forcibly

This is sort of like "communism works, but everybody who's tried it so far was doing it wrong". Regulations lack any kind of competitive mechanism to forcibly correct them, even in the face of unwilling regulators. This is the fundamental problem. Note that competition doesn't have to mean markets. Universities compete fiercely with each other for the best students, and it works. Researchers compete with each other for space in the most prestigious journals (and journals with each other to attract the best articles!). None of these are markets, but they are competitive, which regulatory apparatus is not.