I understand your point, but it doesn't necessarily follow that law->fail. If those people burned alive in a horrible fire, like the patrons of a certain RI nightclub, then we would be calling for the law. Because the homeless have had to find another place to go we won't know.
The problem that I see with regulation is that it's hard to apply it intelligently to each case, so broad, sweeping regulations are made when other, more practical solutions may solve the problem. My pet peeve is the banning of smoking in Boston (I don't smoke and have never been a smoker). Make the law something like "smoke will be undetectable in non-smoking areas to with x parts-per-billion" or something, and let somebody figure out how to build a cheap negative-pressure room for smoking areas in restaurants. Instead, we get "no smoking allowed."
I actually suspect that in a lot of cases (good) regulations help businesses by establishing some trust in the customers' minds.
I understand your point, but it doesn't necessarily follow that law->fail. If those people burned alive in a horrible fire, like the patrons of a certain RI nightclub, then we would be calling for the law.
There comes a point when all that's left is the question, "how many people can be injured in kitchen accidents per X-thousand fed?" People have become strongly conditioned to insist the answer must be zero. So they pass a laws so that there can only be completely safe kitchens. The law fails because instead of safe kitchens, as intended by lawmakers, there are NO kitchens.
I suppose in a perverted way, you could argue that the law actually was a perfect success. All 0 kitchens are completely safe.
But there are kitchens. And they are as safe as we know how to make them (in principle). But some that don't meet those standards are not allowed to operate.
Same with jets. And buildings. The home construction industry in Miami generally concluded that the codes required on houses there were too strict and expensive, so many did not comply. They could have argued that with the rules there wouldn't be houses.
Then Hugo came, and there were (no longer) houses. Plus, we had an expensive mess to clean up.
So just because something is not allowed to happen because it doesn't meet code doesn't mean that the code failed. Perhaps the code did exactly what it was supposed to do.
The problem that I see with regulation is that it's hard to apply it intelligently to each case, so broad, sweeping regulations are made when other, more practical solutions may solve the problem. My pet peeve is the banning of smoking in Boston (I don't smoke and have never been a smoker). Make the law something like "smoke will be undetectable in non-smoking areas to with x parts-per-billion" or something, and let somebody figure out how to build a cheap negative-pressure room for smoking areas in restaurants. Instead, we get "no smoking allowed."
I actually suspect that in a lot of cases (good) regulations help businesses by establishing some trust in the customers' minds.