I agree that all regulation is written in blood. But at the same time, regulation can result in bleeding, and we don't always carefully weigh the costs and benefits of regulation. There may be a law that saves 100 lives a year, but that indirectly causes 150 deaths due to knock-on effects.

It's not easy to inject nuance into a discussion that feels like you have millions of people on each side of a tug-of-war rope that goes from "MORE REGULATION" to "LESS REGULATION".

I think housing, which you mention, is an excellent example. Yes, we need regulation in housing because without it, people will die from shoddy structures collapsing on them, electrocution, gas leaks, etc. But at the same time, in the USA there are absolutely regulations in housing with very little benefit and absolutely massive costs, where we have examples of first-world countries without those regulations that do just fine. I'm talking about things like the requirement that all apartments have 2 stairwells. Or mandatory setbacks and minimum lot sizes and parking requirements. edit -- and of course zoning codes, where we've shifted the market toward building housing that's so big that people can only afford to share it with strangers. And while people used to live in crowded, cramped tenements, driving housing prices up by restricting supply leads to people living on the street.

In medicine, there are diminishing marginal returns to making doctors go through more schooling, and the cost is simply that fewer people choose to be doctors, and people just go without health care. And even within that simple dilemma of "should we make it harder or easier to be a doctor", i'm sure there is a universe of alternate ways to move the needle in different dimensions. Requiring more or less schooling, more or less time in residency, changing limits on the number of hours doctors and nurses can be scheduled in a week, tightening or loosening malpractice law in different ways, etc. Each of these has some positive and negative effects, and I'm sure we have a ways to go before we hit the optimal point. And even then, you have to choose how to balance quality of patient care against doctors and nurses quality of life!

Or take drug approvals. There are drugs in development that show lots of promise, that probably should be made available to people who are dying anyway and want to try them. The FDA does not allow that. We have to balance against companies trying to scam people with fake medicine. No policy is 100% without harm. I believe that, even for policies I strongly advocate.

Or laws that were originally targeted at local environmental protection, that are now being used by nearby residents to stop solar farms from being built, stopping us from reducing fossil fuel usage. Those regulations were written in the blood of wildlife -- and now they're cause much more harm than good to wildlife all across the world.

So if you are asking if we've deteriorated since The Jungle, in many ways, no, of course we've improved safety of working conditions massively, and lots of other things. But in other, important ways, we've gone somewhat backwards. I believe it's absolutely possible to improve our society by removing some regulations, but I think it takes a lot of careful, small, targeted tweaks, where we've carefully weighed the costs and benefits. Though in rare cases, like as in parking minimums, the evidence is that they are so harmful that just scrapping the regulation entirely is the way to go.*