> think even diehard libertarians would admit that "regulations work" in the sense that using the government's monopoly on violence to force companies to do som

> think even diehard libertarians would admit that "regulations work" in the sense that using the government's monopoly on violence to force companies to do something will cause them to do said thing. The debate is whether enacting them is better than the alternative (eg. due to regulatory capture). That isn't really the debate, because we had that debate and decided it was (see seatbelts for an example). Though I guess literally every issue could technically be relitigated and debated constantly ad infinitum, so you're not technically wrong. But we didn't listen to people who said "if you want seatbelts required, just stop buying cars that don't have them". What we see now, for the most part, are individuals who disagree with our consensus, but that's to be expected no matter what we had ultimately decided. So in this case, "it worked" is shorthand for "it successfully got us closer to achieving the goals we decided on"